Tiffany Table Lamps

The marriage of art and nature

It seems altogether appropriate that Comfort is the middle name of the man who created Tiffany table lamps. Louis Comfort Tiffany, eldest son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, was a successful oil and watercolor painter in the 1860s and 70s before turning his creative genius to stained glass and interior design.

His distinctive mix of European and Asian aesthetic influences and persistent experimentation with glass color and texture make Tiffany table lamps coveted for their warmth and natural beauty until this day.

Handiwork

It was Tiffany's intention to bring the same aesthetic idealism he practiced in his art to the world of interior design. Indeed, Tiffany table lamps were born, phoenix-like, from the remains of stained glass windows.

Tiffany originated the idea of using pieces of discarded glass to create beautiful decorative lamps. The lamp bases were typically formed as bronze sculpture, and the shades made of hundreds of colorful hand cut glass shapes set into copper foil enclosures.

Tiffany was a bold, hands-on experimenter, as evidenced by an early patent for a type of glass he called Favrile, which is French for handcrafted. That tactile quality is representative of Tiffany's entire aesthetic.

These table lamps exude a sort of heightened naturalism, with images of lurid creatures such as dragonflies and peacocks permitting the boldest color schemes, or the natural shapes of spider webs and flowers enhancing the organic ambience.

Naturalism

The resulting lamps are not unlike the lamppost in the Chronicles of Narnia, transported magically from England into a foreign world, and set growing in the heart of a newly birthed garden. In similar fashion, Tiffany table lamps redefined the phrase "natural lighting," their artificiality heightening nature, making it something exotic and strange.

An example of this mixture is a Balance Weight Linenfold Tiffany table lamp circa 1900. Only 8 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, a strange round fruit grows from the back of its stem, held in place by an arm that appears both organic and mechanical.

The green glass shade hangs down from a stooped neck, like a snout or cartographer's tool. The total effect is striking, as if one of the carnivorous plants collected by the French eccentric in J.K. Huysman's decadent novel Against Nature had succumbed to its urbane surroundings and imagined itself alight.

Such is the sometimes fantastical appeal of Tiffany table lamps.

Tiffany table lamps today

Though antique Tiffany table lamps can now be found in museums all over the world, new designs combine modern form with Tiffany's old world appeal for the finest in contemporary American home décor.

The Arbora Tiffany table lamp, for example, features a base with two entwined and undulating stems, like thin snakes stretching upward to the feathered wings taking flight from the very peak of the black and white glass shade. Or there is the Arvore Tiffany table lamp, the autumnal foliage of its shade seemingly planted in the middle of a large, seafaring green pepper.

Whether antique or contemporary, Tiffany table lamps will always represent beauty and aesthetic innovation. That's no doubt what Louis Comfort Tiffany would have wanted.

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