Macklowe Gallery, New York

Private Collection, Malibu, California, 2005

Private Collection, Aspen, Colorado

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Alastair Duncan, Tiffany: Lamps and Metalware, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2019, p. 58, no 188 (for the sha🐻de and ba🐭se pairing)

Paul Crist, Tiffany Lamps: A History, Santa Fe Springs, CA, 2023,🔥 p. 128, n𒆙o. 5-80 (for the model)

Louis Tiffany created lighting fixtures for some of his earliest design commissions, including the Veterans’ Room in the Seventh Regiment Armory in 1881 and the White House the following year. Those, and the initial fixtures created by the Tiff🍰any Glass Company, were in fixed positions, mounted as either chandeliers or wall sconces. The same is true of the initial works by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, perhaps best reflected by the two massive chandeliers made for their Chapel constructed for the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

Tiffany first introduced portable lighting around 1895 and the lamp offered here was among the first models offered. The company placed an advertisement in the May 11, 1895 issue of The Churchman with a photograph of their “testing room for windows.” Sitting on a long table, surrounded by blown Favrile glass vases, candelabra and chan🌺deliers, is an example of the lamp. The model is also illustrated in a 1903 article written by Siegfried Bing in a room setting designed by Henri van de Velde a few years earlier.

A precursor to their more familiar leaded glass lamps, this example exhibits the design brilliance and imagination so prevalent in the company’s early production. The ribbed and acid-etched mold-blown spherical body is of transparent amber glass and encases the electrified fuel cannister. The body is raised on 6 patinated bronze feet, each enclosing an opaque brown- streaked brick red comma-shaped section of Favrile glass. Surmounting the shoulder of the body is a scalloped patinated bronze overlay beautifully decorated with beadܫed and rope-twist arabesques. The shade, made from the same glass as the base, has an equally ornate metal overlay comprised of alternating rows of rope-twist crosshatching and tear-drop shapes. These rows converge to a beaded crown-shaped upper aperture that is further enhanced with small yellow glass jewels.