Louis Comfort Tiffany

Elizabeth Ives Bartholet, New York

Christie's New York, June 26, 1981, lot 179A

Century Association, New York, May 7, 1910

In the early 1880s, Tiffany organized a photography shoot in Nauvoo, a multiracial and seasonal fishing village within the town of Sea Bright, New Jersey. In the years thereafter, he used these images to develop a series of oil paintings and watercolors.

Tiffany’s Ice Houses at Sea Bright is a small realist genre painting that shows the wooden ice houses used by the fishermen of Nauvoo. At the center of the composition, we see a figural vignette consisting of a matron with a carriage and young children, a young woman who seems to be pulling off her stockings, and a fisherwoman in an apron. This painting contrasts the laborers of Nauvoo with the well-todo tourists who were attracted to the beach and suggests a harmonious coexistence.

–RAM