Louis Comfort Tiffany Biography | Oil Paintings.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of the jewelry company Tiffany & Co. His first artistic training as a teenager, was as a painter, studying under George Inness in New Jersey and Samuel Colman in New York. At the age of eighteen, during the years 1866-67, he studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and then went to Paris to study with landscape painter Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly in 1868-69.

Although Louis Comfort Tiffany started as a painter, he became interested in glassmaking in 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in the Brooklyn area until 1878. In 1879, he joined with three friends Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman, and Lockwood de Forest to form Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists.

In 1881 Louis Comfort Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House but the new firm's most notable work came a year later when President Chester Alan Arthur wanted the White House redecorated and he commissioned the firm's interior design work, to redo the staterooms. Tiffany was starting to make a name for himself in New York society.

A desire to concentrate on art in glass led to the breakup of the Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists in 1885, and Tiffany established his glassmaking firm that same year as the Tiffany Glass Company, in 1893, Tiffany built a new factory called the Stourbridge Glass Company, later called Tiffany Glass Furnaces and in 1902 it became known as the Tiffany Studios. His father's money and connections combined with Tiffany's leadership and talent led this business to thrive.

At first, Louis Comfort Tiffany bought cheap jelly jars and bottles because they had mineral impurities, which gave a special look and feel to the glass. He was not able to persuade the fine glassmakers to leave the impurities in, so he began making his glass. Tiffany used opalescent glass in an assortment of hues and surfaces to create a unique style of stained glass.

He developed the "copper foil" technique, which made possible a level of detail previously unknown. Previously, the method of creating stained glass for hundreds of years in Europe was by painting in enamels or glass paint on colorless glass and then setting the glass pieces in lead channels. Louis Comfort Tiffany's new method was done by edging each piece of cut glass in copper foil and soldering them together to create his windows and lamps.

Art Movement: Art Nouveau, Aesthetic Art.
Artists Influencing Louis Comfort Tiffany: George Inness, Samuel Colman, Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly.
He Traveled To France, Mexico.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.