Claire de Lune Vase

BRIEF DESCRIPTIONLooking at this Tiffany vase, notice the gold iridescent feather pattern decoration that extends from the base to the shoulder.WHERE WAS IT MADE?Tiffany glass was made at the Tiffany Glass Furnaces in Corona, located in Queens, New York.WHO WAS THE ARTIST?Louis Comfort Tiffany was the eldest son of Charles L. Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Company, the New York jeweler. Tiffany was trained as a painter, studying with both George Inness and Samuel Coleman in New York and Leon Bailly in Paris. He eventually turned his attention to decorative arts and began experimenting with glass-making techniques in 1875. After success with stained glass windows and mosaics, Tiffany established the Tiffany Glass Company in 1885 and began devoting production to one-of-a-kind blown glass art objects. He soon became one of America’s most prolific designers, providing furniture, wallcoverings, textiles, jewelry and glass to some of society’s most important citizens.HOW WAS IT MADE?This small vase is made from opalescent glass, a type of 19th century glass made by covering a gather of molten colored glass with a layer of colorless glass containing bone ash and arsenic or the mineral cryolite, from Greenland. The iridescence of the glass was achieved using a process developed in the early 19th century in which metallic substances were either added to the batch when forming the vessel, or the surface of the vessel was coated with metallic oxides like stannous chloride or lead chloride before firing. Different oxides were known to produce different pigments.WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE THIS?This vase is given the name Clair de Lune, which is French for moonlight. This was also the name of a poem by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) that inspired the work of French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) in the third movement of his Suite Bergamasque.The style of this vase is typical of Tiffany’s Art Nouveau objects. Art Nouveau, French for “New Art,” refers to an artistic style that was developed in Europe in the 1880s, and remained enormously popular into the first decade of the 20th century. It is characterized by whiplash curves, organic imagery and sinuous lines. The name Art Nouveau came from the Paris shop of Siegfried Bing that opened in 1895, quickly popularizing the works of artists like Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose work became synonymous with (or symbolic of) the American Art Nouveau style.