Tiffany chimney breast stands tall again.(Louis Comfort Tiffany at Metropolitan Museum of Art )

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has just opened a lavish exhibition about Louis Comfort Tiffany, the centerpiece of which is a reconstruction of the lovely Daffodil Terrace he erected on the south side of his country house, Laurelton Hall, after 1914 (see pp. 83-93). As can be barely glimpsed through the windowed bay in the photograph illustrated here at top right, the terrace was to the right off the dining room at Laurelton Hall. When fire ravaged the house in 1957, the only interior architectural component to survive was the dining-room chimney breast. It was among numerous elements salvaged from the ruins by Hugh F and Jeannette Genius McKean, and like the pieces from the Daffodil Terrace, it has for many years been in storage at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. The Metropolitan Museum's exhibition has brought it into the light again, and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the curator of the exhibition, and Monica Obniski, a research assistant, kindly provided us with their insights about it, which we are delighted to share with our readers. They write:

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The dining room of Laurelton Hall featured an unusual marble chimney breast. In form and decoration, it is an impressive and unconventional structure--very modern in appearance, starkly simple and unexpectedly angular. Nonetheless, it was a most successful and integral part of the unified interior scheme of the dining room, which was derived from Asian sources that were much admired by Tiffany and his contemporaries. In fact, an embroidered blue-and-white Chinese jacket Tiffany acquired on his travels is said to have been the inspiration for much of the decoration of the room.

Although ...