Tiffany Studios

Private Collection, Chicago, 1959
Thence by descent to the present owner

Dr. Egon Neustadt, The Lamps of Tiffany, New York, 1970, p. 183 (for the shade)
William Feldstein, Jr. and Alastair Duncan, The Lamps of Tiffany Studios, New York, 1983, p. 73 (for the shade)
Margaret K. Hofer and Rebecca Klassen, The Lamps of Tiffany Studios: Nature Illuminated, New York, 2016, p. 82 (for the shade)
Alastair Duncan, Tiffany Lamps and Metalware, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2019, pp. 229, nos. 893-895 (for the base) and 233, nos. 914-915 (for the shade)

The natural world offered Louis Comfort Tiffany's glassmakers and glass selectors with an abundance of opportunities to experiment with color and the transmission of light through glass as they crafted each floral shade. Springtime flowers, such as peonies, tulips, daffodils, and wisteria, each blooming in a riot of vibrant color, were Tiffany's preferred subject surely because they called for the most richly saturated glass selections.  However, Tiffany's depiction of the snowball viburnum—a predominantly white flower—in the present example of the shade model is perhaps one of his most artistic and complex experiments in colored glass.

Though the shade model is often referred to as a "Hydrangea,” Tiffany’s Price List was clear in the identification of this shade as a “Snowball,” the common name for a variety of viburnum. Compared to the hydrangea, which blooms in a variety of white, pink, purple, and blue tones, the viburnum's white flower might seem like a simpler subject.  However, even when depicting the color white, Tiffany demonstrates his mastery of color. In the present domed shade, the snowball blossoms all vary in tone and mottling, influenced by variegated hues of green, cerulean blue and periwinkle that compose the surrounding foliage and sky. So many shades of white occurring in nature—dappled by the sun, reflecting the sky and surrounding leaves and garden—are depicted in an impressionistic style recalling the effect of a painting done en plein air. The vigorously mottled and rippled glass even captures the texture of the clustered viburnum petals, as they fall organically into an irregular scalloped edge. The snowball certainly captured the heart of Tiffany, as he applied the motif in lamp shades as well as windows, including one for the dining room of his private home at Laurelton Hall, now in the collection of the Morse Museum of Art, and another which he exhibited to a global audience at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.