He had many advantages: good looks, money, social skills, connections and talent. He also had a wonderful curiosity. ''He was very New York, but like his friends, he traveled to Paris and London all the time,'' Mr. Loring said. ''He lived at a high point of aesthetic ferment, when there were international fairs with thousands of handmade things on view every few years.''
In 1893, again with the support of his father, he produced his first blown iridescent glass, known as favrile (handmade) glass, and it, too, captured the public's imagination. Through the 1890's, he designed vases, leaded-glass windows and lamps by the thousands. They were sold through his own company, Tiffany Studios. Only after his father's death did he join Tiffany & Company, while continuing to lead Tiffany Studios. Working with his father's most trusted collaborators, the gemologist George Frederick Kunz and John T. Curran, an expert enameler, he began designing jewelry.
He created the lavish interior of Henry O. Havemeyer's new Fifth Avenue mansion and received commissions from Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Mark Twain and the White House, then occupied by President Chester A. Arthur. In New York, he decorated the magnificent Veterans' Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory, which remains unchanged to this day.
Mr. Loring, the company's current design director, is the author of '' *** Comfort Tiffany at Tiffany & Company'' (Harry N. Abrams, 2002), in which he writes: ''By 1979, when I came to Tiffany & Company as design director, Hoving's direction had in no way changed. There was not a single design of *** Comfort Tiffany in the company's collections, nor any mention of him in the company's literature beyond the fact that he had been named its first design director in 1902 and that his jewelry, as well as many of his decorative objects, had been retailed by Tiffany.''
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Apparently, Tiffany did not want to go into the family business. He may have been envious of the support his father gave to his head jeweler, Paulding Farnham. (After the younger Tiffany took over the business, he never allowed Farnham to exhibit his jewelry in international fairs.) With his father's financial support, Tiffany started experimenting with opalescent stained glass. In 1879 he formed *** C. Tiffany and Associated Artists, an interior design firm, with Colman, Lockwood de Forest and the textile designer Candace Wheeler. Its success came quickly.
''L. C. T. was a forerunner of fashion jewelry, using materials that had very little value,'' Mr. Loring said. ''He was totally focused on making things for a great American emporium that people could afford.'' Instead of diamonds and rubies, Tiffany used demantoid (green) garnets, American freshwater pearls, Montana (as opposed to Kashmir) sapphires, turquoise from Arizona, tourmalines from Maine and fire opals from Mexico. He mixed semiprecious stones with favrile glass and enamels.
Reviving Tiffany At Tiffany's
John Loring is trying to put the Tiffany back into Tiffany & Company. *** Comfort Tiffany, that is, the son of the company's founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany, and its design director from 1902 to 1918. Apparently, the company has been trying to forget him since 1955, when Walter Hoving bought a controlling interest in it from Tiffany family members.
Born in 1848 into a wealthy, prominent New York family, Tiffany was sent away to military school in New Jersey. ''However, L. C. T., as he was known, had no inclinations toward a life in the military,'' Mr. Loring said in an interview. ''He spent his days running off to George Inness's studio.'' He studied painting with Inness, the New York painter Samuel Colman and the Orientalist salon painter Léon Bailly.
Tiffany apprenticed under Bailly in Paris and traveled across Spain, North Africa and Egypt with Colman, painting watercolors and oils that he showed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. He developed an interest in ancient Roman and Syrian glass, Byzantine mosaics and Gothic stained glass.
While best known for his spectacular stained glass windows and lamps, which now bring hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, Tiffany was also an accomplished landscape painter, highly successful decorator, brilliant marketer and a multifaceted designer of ceramics, jewelry, tableware, wallpaper, textiles, opalescent glass vessels, tiles and mosaics.
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