Tiffany pottery.(Current and Coming)

Louis Comfort Tiffany and members of his studio worked in nearly every conceivable medium of the decorative arts. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the objects they produced were more commercially successful than others and that their survival rate is often relative to total production. A case in point is Tiffany's art pottery. Between approximately 1904 and 1914 craftsmen at Tiffany Furnaces in Corona, New York, created only about two thousand pieces of art pottery, making it today among the rarest of Tiffany productions in any medium. The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, has one of the largest concentrations of Tiffany objects in the country, including about one hundred pieces of art pottery. Many of these are being exhibited in a special exhibition entitled Sculpting Nature: The Favrile Pottery of L.C. Tiffany, which is on view from February 3 through January 9, 2005.

Tiffany long had an interest in ceramics and was an avid collector of art pottery. As early as 1898 he began experimenting with ceramics. Two years later in the showroom of Tiffany Studios he exhibited a collection of innovative French pottery he had seen at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1902 an article in Keramic Studio predicted: "Mr. Tiffany, the maker of the beautiful Favrile glass, is experimenting in pottery, and it is very probable that he is not following beaten paths and that we will see sooner or later some striking and artistic potteries come out of his kilns." Indeed, two ...