The exhibition of the designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany, ”the Jewels of Louis Comfort Tiffany” at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich has shown almost 50 examples of the great American designer’s exquisite jewelry filling a few dozen evenly spaced, dimly lit display cases and there are three masterpieces of iridescent Horse charm bracelet.
Louis Comfort Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co. Although celebrated today for his stained glass, vases, and lamps, the younger Tiffany also designed a breathtaking array of jewelry during his long tenure as design director of the company from 1902 to 1918.
Tiffany was passionate about nature, and many of his designs of tiffany jewellery contain organic motifs inspired by the landscape surrounding his Long Island home. Among them in this show are three lovely vine brooches, two with central sapphires and a third with a shapely slug of lapis lazuli. Hand-worked gold and textured, varicolored enamel are used, and sometimes even blended, to capture the mottled surface and play of light on the leaves. The overall effect is enchanting.
The most fetching object in the exhibition is a superb dragonfly brooch executed in black Australian opals and green garnets with gold, platinum and silver Link necklace. The piece was first shown at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it helped cement Tiffany’s reputation as the preeminent American exponent of Art Nouveau, that fin-de-siecle decorative arts style favoring sinuous lines based on plant forms and an overall reverence for nature.