Mention turn-of-the-century decorative arts, and one name inevitably pops up – American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933). Over a long career that spanned from 1870 to the “gilded” age of the 1920s, Tiffany was a “Renaissance” man who excelled in many areas of decorative arts, including glass, furniture, textile and metal works. But his fame is founded principally on his luminous glass designs which combined superb artistry with a love of natural forms and vivid color.

The sumptuous “Fish and Waves” lamp (pictured) integrates two of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s greatest passion: the natural world and Japanese aesthetics [1]. Typical of a Tiffany inspired design, the leaded lamp shade luxuriates in brilliant colors. It depicts nine goldfish swimming amidst seaweed within swirling currents of sun-dappled water. The bronze base itself is a work of art. Here, three large fish are shown leaping through waves in high relief.

This lamp reflects an early moment in the history of Tiffany Studios’ creation of table lamps. The designer was most likely Clara Driscoll, who headed the Women’s Glass Cutting Division at Tiffany Studios. Distinct from the firm’s production lamps, which typically display repetitive patterns in the lamp shade, “Fish and Waves” presents a non-repeating pictorial composition around the shade circumference, the only known example of this highly evocative design.

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Notes: The influence of Japanese art on American Art deco

[1] Western culture was revolutionized through its contact with Japanese art. Beginning in the mid-19th Century when Commodore Perry and his naval fleet entered Yokohama and forced Japan to end its policy of isolation, Japanese prints and objects in all media—textiles, ceramics, bronzes—played an important part in transforming Western aesthetics. In the 1860s, and continuing into the 1870s and 1880s, the motifs borrowed from Japanese art became omnipresent. These motifs included flying cranes, branches of flowering cherry, carp in turbulent water, birds in the rain, clouds crossing the moon. By the turn of the century such superficial borrowings gave way to a subtler understanding of Japanese art, when artists ceased to cease a literal copying of Japanese prints and instead, returned to the source of Japanese art—nature itself, going into the field to study the simplest of plants and insects, and the forest to discover the beauty of the humblest mushrooms and ferns. Tiffany and his assistants were swept up in this new and fervent exaltation of Nature. As Tiffany proclaimed: “Nature is always right. Nature is always beautiful.” (Source: Sotheby’s “Dreaming in Glass: Masterworks by Tiffany Studios, May 2019)