The Morning Glory Paperweight Vases were among the most technically complex and thus expensive pieces of blown Favrile Glass retailed by Tiffany Studios.
This example depicts impressionistic Morning Glories in pale blue with lavender stripes surrounded by a profusion of swirling thin vines in a contrasting deep gold glass with lavender highlights. The floral motif is cased within a thick layer of clear glass, giving the impression that the flowers are floating above a background of golden iridescence; the interior of the vase was fumed, allowing a shimmering silvery blue tone to transmit through the design.
An entry by Tiffany’s glass chemist Leslie Nash in his personal notebooks, held by the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass, recounts a tale in which Louis Comfort Tiffany came to the glassworks with a watercolor of morning glories, requesting that his artisans bring his sketch to life in glass (this watercolor sketch survives in the collection of the Halim Time & Glass Museum). After a series of painstaking and costly experiments, a very limited run of Morning Glory paperweight vases were produced. Due to the high cost of production, each vase retailed for $1,000.
The first Morning Glory vase was shown at the 1900 Expostition Universelle in Paris, around the same time that this example was produced. Tiffany continued to publicly exhibit Morning Glory vases; examples were exhibited at the 1914 Paris Salon and the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. A Morning Glory Vase was given a place of honor at the Paris Salon and achieved the highest award ever given to art glass.
Louis Comfort Tiffany loaned a Morning Glory Paperweight Vase from his personal collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1925, where the vase remained on display until it was officially donated to the museum by the Tiffany Foundation in 1951.
This important example of early original Tiffany Favrile Glass is inscribed on the underside with signature and date code.
A related example in the same signature sequence is in the permanent collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, FL (79-531). A similar related example is illustrated as the frontispiece of Tiffany Favrile Glass and the Quest of Beauty, Lillian Nassau LLC’s landmark 2007 collaboration with Tiffany scholar Dr. Martin Eidelberg.
Height: 8 ½ inches (21.6 cm)
Diameter: 5 ¾ inches (14.6 cm)
References:
Martin Eidelberg, Tiffany Favrile Glass and the Quest of Beauty, New York, 2007, pp. 2; 64
