No fewer than 11 purveyors of stained glass exhibited their wares at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, but 10 of them could have saved themselves the bother of setting up on the South Side fairgrounds.
Seekers of beauty hied themselves to a chapel-like room that had been designed by a brilliant, shrewd artist as a showplace for his transcendently beautiful stained-glass windows and intricate mosaics. It was a fantasy chamber that combined Romanesque and Byzantine styles, and it was filled with the kind of decorative objects — candlesticks, vases, bowls and so on — that a rising middle class was eager to acquire.
By the end of the fair, the chapel’s creator, Louis Comfort Tiffany, had won 54 awards for his display, which newspapers of the day said had been visited by more than 1 million people. The international acclaim from the fair catapulted Tiffany from a comfortable position as a decorator and designer for wealthy East Coast clients to the status of a design star whose lamps, stained-glass windows, mosaics, vases, jewelry and countless other objets became highly prized trophies in the well-appointed parlors of the Gilded Age.
They remain highly prized — and certainly high-priced. With their lush colors, intricate designs and reliance on natural forms, Tiffany’s glass and lamps are ever-popular crowd-pleasers, as demonstrated by a number of current or upcoming auctions and exhibits, organized around the 150th anniversary of the designer’s birth. That includes the unveiling early next year of the restored Columbian Exposition chapel, which survived decades of neglect and was eventually rescued from the burned ruins of Tiffany’s Long Island estate.
A theme that emerges from these varied events is the strong and seemingly unlikely connection between the highly refined New Yorker and the town that H.L. Mencken called “the abattoir on the lake.” Tiffany opened a Chicago branch of his New York firm in 1884, nine years before the fair, and over the decades created many memorable works in the city that first brought him to international fame.
Among the best known examples of Tiffany’s work in Chicago are the stunning mosaics of Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center, the mosaic frieze in the lobby of the Marquette Building and the dome that hovers high over shoppers at Marshall Field’s State Street store. Fine examples of his stained-glass church windows are preserved at Second Presbyterian Church on South Michigan Avenue and at First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest.
“I wish someone would write a dissertation about Tiffany and Chicago,” said Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of an exhibition of some 150 Tiffany works at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Chicago seems to have been a focal point for his work.”
Tiffany, who was born in 1848, came by his sense of luxurious beauty naturally. He was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of the jewelry company, which was especially known for its fine silverwork. The elder Tiffany wanted his son to follow him into the business, but Louis had other interests. Shortly after the Civil War, he traveled to Europe and North Africa and took up painting. Some of these early works, which show an already-receptive eye for color and a taste for the exotic styles of the Near and Far East, are included in the Metropolitan’s exhibit, which runs through the end of January.
But it was as an interior decorator that Tiffany first made a name for himself. The combination of talent and connections — his father’s jewelry was already famous among the era’s captains of industry and their consorts — proved irresistible. As a young man with only a few years’ experience, he secured commissions from many wealthy clients, stuffing their mansions with Oriental rugs, carved woodwork from India, and Chinese and Japanese pottery, porcelain and metalwork. By the early 1880s, he had decorated the Hartford home of Mark Twain and the White House for President Chester A. Arthur.
From designing interiors, he moved to designing objects, often using the opalescent glass that he had developed. He called his invention favrile glass, a more euphonious form of the Old English word “fabrile,” meaning hand-wrought.
Tiffany’s works have always been luxury items. In 1906, Tiffany Studios offered more than 125 styles of lampshades, ranging in price from $30 to a princely $750. Now, with Tiffany more popular than ever, prices for original pieces have leaped skyward. Tiffany stained-glass windows have sold for more than $1 million. And Christie’s, which recently held an all-Tiffany auction that included stained-glass windows and floor and table lamps, set a record last year when it knocked down a Tiffany lamp for $2.8 million, the most ever paid at auction for a piece of 20th Century decorative artwork.
“I don’t know anybody who epitomizes a Renaissance man of the arts as he does, in that there was virtually no medium that he did not touch,” said Frelinghuysen, the Metropolitan’s curator of American decorative arts. “Decorative designs, lamps, jewelry, furniture, vases, glass, enamelware, desk sets, book design, you name it. He wanted to put his mark on every aspect of a building, and that’s his true genius, I think.”
Of all the forms that Tiffany worked in, he prided himself most on his stained-glass windows, which had fairly traditional religious subjects if they were destined for churches or featured scenes from nature, such as tree-lined rivers or waterfalls, if the windows were for secular uses. Tiffany used a stunning variety of shapes and colors to create scenes of shimmering, glowing beauty. To achieve the right colors or to lend a three-dimensional feel to his windows, he would often solder two or more additional pieces of glass in places on the backs of his designs.
To show off his windows at the Columbian Exposition, he designed a showroom that measured about 28 feet by 40 feet, with a height of 24 feet. The interior surfaces were covered in Tiffany’s own mosaics. With the room’s stained-glass windows, it’s little wonder that it quickly came to be called a chapel, although its purpose was starkly commercial.
“(The Columbian Exposition) was a trade exposition and Tiffany’s interest in it was to develop trade,” said Laurence Ruggiero, director of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum in Winter Park, Fla., which plans to put the restored chapel on permanent display in March. “But the effect was so overwhelming that men would take their hats off as if it were a consecrated space.”
According to Frelinghuysen, it is likely that one of the first results of the sensation that Tiffany created at the fair was a prestigious commission from Mrs. Henry Field to design a gallery at the new Art Institute building on Michigan Avenue. Henry Field, brother of department store magnate Marshall Field, had recently died, and his widow wanted to create a suitable gallery at the Art Institute where their collection of the Barbizon art of mid-19th Century France could be displayed.
The gallery, which no longer exists, was a lush setting for the paintings, with mosaic floors, ebony woodwork, gray-green velour walls and a 14-by-34-foot leaded-glass canopy that was suspended from the ceiling to diffuse the light in the room.
“It must have been a very beautiful gallery,” said Frelinghuysen wistfully. The gallery was demolished in the 1940s, but Tiffany’s plan is included in the Metropolitan exhibit.
Tiffany’s breakthrough at the fair came at a time when Chicagoans were self-consciously striving to improve the city’s civic amenities. Such edifices as the new public library — now the Cultural Center — and Marshall Field’s new State Street store were expressions of the city’s desire to shed its rough-and-tumble image and take its place among the great cities of the world. Tiffany’s elegant mosaics for the library and Marshall Field’s were tailor-made for such a purpose.
“They express the desire of Chicagoans of the time to give the impression that Chicago was a city that was just then emerging and booming, not just in an economic sense but also in a cultural sense,” said Kathleen Cummings, a Chicago architectural historian who is studying Tiffany’s works in the city. “Public buildings needed decorative elements like these, and they were intended to be edifying.”
The Field mosaic provided comfort to “lovers of beauty,” wrote Edmund Buckley, a University of Chicago professor, in 1908, because the “masterly mosaic over a mart of trade” brought art into the lives of ordinary people. The “greedy graspers that want to own everything in sight,” commented the good professor, “can only be chagrined at meeting with an object they can never even hope to acquire.”
The most recent and perhaps most fitting connection between the elegant esthete and the big-shouldered city involves the salvation and restoration of Tiffany’s chapel. After the fair, a wealthy benefactor bought the chapel for New York’s Episcopal cathedral, the Church of St. John the Divine, where it was cut down to size and banished to a basement. Over the years, it suffered extensive water damage until Tiffany had it removed, restored it, and installed it at his Long Island estate.
Following Tiffany’s death in 1933, the estate was gradually abandoned until it was ravaged by a fire in 1957. Enter Hugh and Jeannette McKean, devoted Tiffany collectors who bought much of the remaining contents of Tiffany’s estate, including the chapel.
Jeannette McKean was the granddaughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, who amassed a fortune in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as the controlling partner of Fairbanks, Morse and Co., a Chicago manufacturing firm that produced trucks, railroad cars, motors and an array of other machinery.
With a portion of Morse’s fortune, the McKeans established a museum for their collection of American decorative objects, including their vast Tiffany collection. Now, after sitting in storage for almost 40 years, the chapel will be the centerpiece of a new $4 million expansion of the Morse Museum.
And so, thanks to the wealth of a Chicago machine manufacturer, one of Tiffany’s most outstanding creations was saved and will be put on view for the general public for the first time since the Columbian Exposition.
“You’re talking about the real, fundamental basis of his achievement,” said museum director Ruggiero, referring to the chapel. “It’s really fascinating that this designer, who was from the Northeast and whose first great audience was in New York, became an international success because of this chapel in Chicago.”
