Favrile Vase

Tiffany’s naturalistic art glass catered to elite Americans’ taste for singular, handmade objects. With their asymmetrical, organic forms and unevenly distributed colors, these works stand in stark contrast to the more uniform, mass-produced goods that proliferated at the turn of the nineteenth century. A skillful marketer, Tiffany branded his glass “favrile,” a loose adaption of the Old English word “fabrille” or “hand wrought.” Tiffany employed teams of skilled artisans at his glassworks in Corona, New York, to transform his sketched designs into three-dimensional objects. Producing the multicolored surfaces of these vases required manual dexterity and a working knowledge of chemistry. The artisans incorporated colored canes, or rods, into the glass when it was still hot and malleable and then treated the glass with metal oxides to give each form a striking iridescent finish.