Museum accessions.(Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquires objects by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Edward William Godwin)(Brief Article)

Louis Comfort Tiffany and Edward William Godwin had many things in common. Both were seminal figures in design on their respective sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the second half of the nineteenth century; both were influenced by the painter James McNeill Whistler and Japanese art; both designed objects across a wide spectrum of mediums and often with a total vision in mind. Recently, important domestic examples by these two tastemakers have been acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

The side chair (illustrated above) was made to Godwin's designs by William Watt of Grafton Street, London, one of the many manufacturers who executed Godwin's furniture. It is virtually identical to a chair that was part of a suite Watt displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. The centerpiece of the suite was a cabinet (now in the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow) painted with butterflies, clouds, and chrysanthemum petals by Whistler, who called it "Harmony in Yellow and Gold." It is considered his most famous foray into the decorative arts, after the celebrated Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The pale yellow mahogany and the caning of the seat and part of the back of the chair correspond to the coloring of the cabinet decoration, and the chair's delicate design and Japanesque inspiration is equally in tune with the cabinet. In a period dominated by heavy revival styles, such designs were truly revolutionary, precursors to the modern idiom.

On this side of the Atlantic, Tiffany was in the vanguard of design reform, also drawing inspiration from the Far East, often by way of Whistler's work. The screen (illustrated at left) acquired by the Virginia Museum clearly recalls the color scheme of Whistler's Peacock Room, completed only a few years earlier in 1879. The screen's intricate patterns and combination of painted panels and aged-glass jewels set in wirework at once suggest the exotic and the antique, while the stark wooden frame bespeaks Tiffany's modernity.

The screen is part of the decorative scheme Tiffany devised with his colleagues at Associated Artists for the extravagant thirty-room residence designed by James C. Cutler in Rochester, New York, for William S. Kimball, a tobacco magnate, and his second wife, ...