This rare example of Tiffany Favrile Pottery dates from around 1905, shortly after Louis Comfort Tiffany first debuted Favrile Pottery at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. Tiffany had worked with the artists at Tiffany Studios, including a select group of the “Tiffany Girls,” to develop Tiffany Favrile Pottery after visiting the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris where he was influenced by displays of antique Chinese and Japanese ceramics and their subsequent interpretation by Art Nouveau ceramicists.
The motif of tulips in low relief which descend from the rib and down the body of this rare vase was likely inspired by a watercolor sketch by Lillian Palmié, one of the Tiffany Girls working in Tiffany’s specialized Pottery and Enamel department; the sketch is preserved in the collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida (89-008).
This rare vase features an allover variegated green glaze with accents of pale blue-green and soft yellow-green along the curved, inverted rim.
This important example of Tiffany Favrile Pottery is inscribed on the underside.
An example of this form executed in Tiffany’s “Bronze Pottery,” also in the collection of the Morse Museum (80‑013), is illustrated in Tiffany Favrile Pottery and the Quest of Beauty, written by eminent Tiffany scholar Dr. Martin Eidelberg and published by Lillian Nassau LLC in 2010.
Height: 5 ¾ inches (14.6 cm)
Diameter: 8 ⅜ inches (21.3 cm)
References:
Martin Eidelberg, Tiffany Favrile Pottery and the Quest of Beauty, New York, 2010, pg. 70, and 92, fig. 175
