This Favrile Pottery Cabinet Vase was likely designed around 1905 by one of the “Tiffany Girls” tasked specifically with designing objects for Favrile Pottery and Enamel, who worked out of a specialized studio space known as “Little Arcadia” in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s complex in Corona, Queens.
Milkweed seems to have been a plant which held a certain fascination over Tiffany and his designers; Tiffany Studios produced a variety of objects depicting this plant, including an example of Favrile Pottery signed by Alice Gouvy as well as an enamel on copper inkwell signed by Edith Lautrup, both in the collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida.
An example of this form in enamel on copper was previously held by the Garden Museum in Matsue, Japan, an important collection assembled over several decades by Japanese businessman Takeo Horiuchi which held some of the finest work by Louis C. Tiffany and Tiffany Studios. The Garden Museum Collection was deaccessioned in a series of auctions beginning in 2014 due to concerns stemming from the increased number of earthquakes in the region.
References:
Martin Eidelberg, Tiffany Favrile Pottery and the Quest of Beauty (Lillian Nassau LLC, New York, 2010), pg. 94 fig. 211
