Louis Comfort Tiffany, Tiffany Glass Company
“Flower, Fish and Fruit” Window Panel
1879-1889
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Louis Comfort Tiffany, Tiffany Glass Company
“Flower, Fish and Fruit” Window Panel
1879-1889
Physical Qualities
Stained glass, lead, 31 1/4 x 42 3/4 x 4 in. (79.4 x 108.6 x 10.2 cm)
Credit Line
101 West Monument Street Corporation Funds
Object Number
1979.173
A lazily looping ribbon barely contains a riot of fruits and flowers in Tiffany’s extravagant stained- glass composition. It centered a three-piece over-door transom window made for the dining room of Baltimore suffragist and philanthropist Mary Elizabeth Garrett and her partner, M. Carey Thomas, who was the president of Bryn Mawr College. Whimsical goldfish, swimming in two suspended circular fishbowls, are easily spotted, recalling bright copper fish applied to Edward C. Moore’s silver pitcher for Tiffany & Company, shown nearby. More challenging to find are six little bluebirds hiding amidst the flower petals. In 1899, Art Nouveau entrepreneur Siegfried Bing exhibited Tiffany’s original cartoon for this window at the Grafton Galleries, London, showing it along with paintings by French Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. Indeed, Tiffany’s work was a novel form of painting with light. Skillful artisans, many of them women, created spectacular light effects by plating different pieces of colored glass in layers, following the cartoon. Tiffany himself liked the flower, fish, and fruit design so much that he later replicated it for his personal retrospective gallery of stained- glass windows at Laurelton Hall, his Long Island country house.
Publication References
Koch, Robert. "Louis C. Tiffany: Rebel in Glass," 1964. ill. p. 198.
Duncan, Alistair. "Tiffany Windows," New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. pl. 89.
"Los Jardines del Cielo," "Vogue, April 2007, ill.
"60 Objects Countless Stories," BMA Today, Winter 2008-2009, pp. 6-7, ill. p. 6.
Andre, Linda. "Flower, Fish and Fruit by Louis Comfort Tiffany," School Arts, November 2009, ill.
Baltimore Museum of Art. "The Baltimore Museum of Art: Celebrating a Museum." Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2014.
Gadsden, Nonie. "Louis Comfort Tiffany: Parakeets Window." Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018.
Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney. "Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate," The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (101 West Monument Street Corporation), by purchase, c. 1925; Mary Elizabeth Garrett, by purchase for 101 West Monument Street, Baltimore, c. 1885; Tiffany Glass Company, Northeast, New York
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Alistair Duncan, "Tiffany Windows," NY: Simon and Schuster, 1980, pl. 89.