Reynolda presents ‘Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light’

Iconic works by Louis Comfort Tiffany will shine at Reynolda March 28-June 21, 2020

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Oct. 29, 2019) — Reynolda House Museum of American Art will present Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light, organized by The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in Queens, New York. The traveling exhibition will be on view from March 28-June 21, 2020. 

The first exhibition of its kind at Reynolda, it includes five windows, 20 lamps, and displays showing how Tiffany glass was manufactured, how his lamps were assembled and how collectors today can distinguish between authentic lamps and forgeries. To complement the exhibition, Reynolda has created a special installation of Katharine Smith Reynolds’s collection of Tiffany blown-glass vases. The floral themes of Tiffany’s iconic works will also carry over to Reynolda Gardens, where visitors will be invited to enjoy spring blooms in the four-acre formal garden as well as the greater grounds of the former Reynolda estate.

Allison Perkins, executive director of the museum explains, “No decorative artist is better fitted to the essence of this country estate, where the Reynolds family was surrounded by flowers and wildlife. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s bewildering inventiveness and versatility made him one of the wonders of the age. Yet his dogged fidelity to nature makes his glass creations both timeless, at the same time familiar and inexhaustibly arresting.”

As a painter, Louis C. Tiffany (1848–1933), son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of luxury retailer Tiffany & Company, was captivated by the interplay of light and color, and this fascination found its most spectacular expression in his glass “paintings.” Using new and innovative techniques and materials, Tiffany Studios created leaded-glass windows and lampshades in vibrant colors and richly varied patterns, textures, and opacities. Tiffany’s chemists developed techniques to produce colored glass in a dazzling variety of colors and styles, rather than simply painting on glass to create naturalistic effects.

The exhibition features some of the most celebrated of Tiffany’s works. Chosen for their masterful rendering of nature in flowers or landscape scenes, they exemplify the rich and varied glass palette, sensitive color selection, and intricacy of design that was characteristic of Tiffany’s work. This exhibition also highlights some of the key figures at Tiffany Studios who made essential contributions to the artistry of the windows and lamps— chemist Arthur J. Nash and designers Clara Driscoll, Agnes Northrop and Frederick Wilson. 

Tiffany’s technical brilliance in a wide variety of media enabled him to convey his awe of the natural world through a range of objects, from common household items to one-of-a-kind masterpieces. He earned international acclaim for his artistic output, receiving prestigious awards in exhibitions and world’s fairs across Europe and the United States. His work was enthusiastically collected by art museums and private collectors throughout his lifetime, and continues to be highly sought after today. 

Tickets to Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light are on sale now at reynoldahouse.org/tiffany.

About Reynolda
Reynolda, in Winston-Salem, N.C., is a rare gem among the nation’s cultural institutions and historic greenspaces. The 51-year-old museum at the center of Reynolda’s 180 acres, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, presents a renowned art collection in a historic and incomparable setting: the original 1917 interiors of the country manor of R. J. Reynolds. Spanning 250 years, the collection is an uncompromisingly selective one, a chronology of American art, with each artist represented by one work of major significance. Highlights are: Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Stuart Davis, Martin Johnson Heade, Alex Katz, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Singer Sargent and Grant Wood. The collection was assembled by the unerring eye of Barbara Babcock Millhouse, granddaughter of R. J. and Katharine Reynolds. The Reynolda experience includes a free app called Reynolda Revealed; touring exhibitions in the museum’s Mary and Charlie Babcock Wing; formal gardens, conservatory and walking trails of Reynolda Gardens; and more than 25 of the estate’s original buildings repurposed as shops and restaurants in Reynolda Village. Reynolda, located at 2250 Reynolda Road, is adjacent to Wake Forest University. For more information, please visit reynolda.org.

Connect at facebook.com/rhmaa and @CurateReynolda on Instagram.

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Media Contact
Kaci Baez
336.758.5524 or kaci@reynolda.org