Tiffany in Chicago

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Dragonfly lamp by Tiffany Studios, shade designed by Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), c. 1902–1906. Blown glass, patinated bronze. Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago; photograph by John Faier.

The distinguished Chicago philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus has pursued Louis Comfort Tiffany’s “quest of beauty” since the early 1980s, when he bought his first stained-glass window attributed to the master artist. Over the next thirty years, Driehaus not only contin­ued to expand his collection of Tiffany artworks but he also purchased the Gilded Age Samuel M. Nickerson mansion in Chicago. After meticulously restor­ing its aesthetic period interiors and opening it to the public, he estab­lished an exhibition space on the second floor, where the inaugural exhibition, Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection, opens this month.

More than sixty Tiffany objects, including stained-glass windows, lamps, vases, acces­sories, and furniture are displayed together publicly for the first time. Among them is a candelabrum from the chapel exhibited by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company at the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exhibition also features a dragonfly lamp of about 1902 composed of a bronze base with a stained-glass shade of green leaves and mottled brown and yellow dragonflies, a motif credited to Tiffany’s principal stained-glass designer and head of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department, Clara Driscoll. The Driehaus Museum in the re­stored Nickerson mansion is an ideal setting to present these beautiful and intricate pieces of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s extraordinary output. The show is accompanied by a catalogue of the collection.

Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection · Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago · September 28 to June 29, 2014 · driehausmuseum.org

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