This rare Tiffany Favrile Pottery vase is one from a series in which the vessels take the form of the plant itself, and was likely designed for Tiffany Studios by Alice Carmen Gouvy, a designer and "Tiffany Girl" working at Louis Comfort Tiffany's complex in Corona, Queens.
In this example, the irregular leaves of the humble skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) have been translated into gleaming Favrile Pottery. They sprout from the ground, in shades of dark variegated green-brown with nearly black lowlights, overlapping and leaving negative space as they thin out near the rim of the vase.
The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art acquired a series of studies by "Tiffany Girl" Alice Gouvy (accession no. 2020-007) in watercolor and pencil which portray the skunk cabbage from several angles, a choice which would have aided in translating two dimensional sketches into a three dimensional vase. This sketch, which features various production notes from Tiffany Furnaces, was unveiled in the exhibition "Watercolors from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s 'Little Arcadia'" in 2021.
Height: ( cm)
Illustrated:
Martin Eidelberg, Tiffany Favrile Pottery
