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OVERVIEW
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YOUNG WOMAN
AT A FOUNTAIN, c. 1894
Leaded-glass
window
Tiffany Glass and
Decorating Company
(66-004) |
The centerpiece of the Morse Museum collection is undoubtedly the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The Museum's collection of Tiffany's work includes fine examples in every medium he explored, in every kind of work he produced and from every period of his life.
The variety of the Morse's Tiffany holdings range from his famed leaded-glass windows to glass buttons he fashioned to make even life's most humble objects expressions of beauty available to a broad public. It includes paintings and extensive examples of his pottery, as well as jewelry, enamels, mosaics, watercolors, lamps, furniture and scores of examples of his Favrile blown glass.
Among the most fascinating objects in the Tiffany collection are the brilliantly colorful windows, mosaics, Byzantine-Romanesque architectural elements and furnishings of the chapel he created for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The chapel has been reassembled and is open to the general public for the first time in more than 100 years. It was Tiffany's work at the 1893 exposition, and especially the chapel , that established him as a universally acknowledged member of the small international circle of leading artists/designers of the period — the only American in that group.
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LIBRARY LAMP, c. 1910
Dragonfly and water design
Leaded glass and bronze
Tiffany Studios
(69-003) |
Beyond the work of Tiffany's personal design is the work that he supervised and controlled after he created his studio operation and established its great popular success. His deep personal involvement meant that Tiffany Studios produced unusually high quality objects in a great variety of designs and materials over an extended period of time. The artist's painstaking attention to the details of design and production recall the studio arrangement of past masters like Rubens, who created and maintained a large painting studio in the seventeenth century, as well as English artist and designer William Morris, who created a famous group design and production arrangement.
Over the years, objects from the Morse's Tiffany collection have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. and other institutions throughout the country.
The "Oyster Bay" window (a long-term loan) and the magnificent loggia (a gift) from Tiffany's Oyster Bay, Long Island estate provide major focal points in the Charles Englehard Courtyard of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Both are from the Morse collection.
The Other Collections
Although internationally renowned for its unique Tiffany collection, the Morse is more than a Tiffany museum: It also houses American decorative art from the mid-nineteenth century to the early-twentieth century with important holdings in the area known as the Arts and Crafts. Additionally, the museum has a significant collection of American paintings primarily of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with particular strength in work which relates to Florida and its artists.
Decorative Arts and Sculpture:
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ROOKWOOD POTTERY, 1913-1918
Glazed white clay
Rookwood Pottery, Cincinnati, 1880-1967
(PO-036-76; PO-049-86; PO-033-82) |
In addition to works by Tiffany, the collection includes
leaded-glass windows by William Morris, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, John LaFarge and Arthur Nash. The Museum's jewelry and silver collections feature pieces by Emile Gallé, Rene Lalique and Carl Faberge. Gallé and Louis Majorelle are represented In the furniture collection, along with Tiffany and Gustav Stickley.
Of particular interest is the Morse's extensive American Art Pottery collection which now numbers over 800 examples (including approximately 500 Rookwood pieces) of the richly creative nineteenth century American Art Pottery movement. The movement sought to give America, which had been overrun with badly designed and poorly made, mass-produced products, a new world of handcrafted beauty. The sculpture collection includes work by Thomas Crawford, Hiram Powers, Daniel Chester French, John Rogers and others.
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HAPPY GIRL, c. 1910
Oil on canvas
Robert Henri (1865-1929)
(P-059-87)
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Painting and Graphic Arts:
The museum's fine collection of American paintings and prints, a major portion of which centers around work done in or about Florida, features work by Samuel F.B. Morse (a relative of Charles Hosmer Morse), Thomas Doughty, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, Rembrandt Peale, Cecilia Beaux, Martin Johnson Heade, Maxfield Parrish, Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Hermann Herzog, Thomas Hart Benton, Samuel Colman and others.
The museum's prints include works by some of the same artists as well as by Grant Wood, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Childe Hassam, John Stewart Curry and Edward Hopper.
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