Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was born in New York City. His father founded the renowned jewelry firm Tiffany & Company. As a young man, Louis traveled Europe and North Africa studying art and painting. He soon combined his artistic studies with his business knowledge to establish Tiffany Studios. He created decorative works such as lamps, ceramics, and mosaics. Tiffany was part of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s and 1880s, which elevated the decorative arts, and the organic Art Nouveau style of the 1890s.
Tiffany’s innovations in stained glass brought a new level of artistry to the medium. He worked with chemists to create Favrile glass with vibrant colors and iridescent finishes, and opalescent glass with semi-opaque swirls. He varied the width of his lead strips, or cames, to enhance their representational function. With these new techniques, he composed groundbreaking naturalistic works.
Instead of painting details on the glass, Tiffany used the inherent striations, textures, and varied thickness of the glass itself to suggest volume and texture in the object he was depicting. First, he created watercolor sketches of the windows, full-sized cartoons, and templates for each piece. Then Tiffany instructed his craftsmen to twist and fold multicolored molten glass to create tonal gradations and marbled color. The craftspeople carefully picked, cut, ground, and assembled the pieces. Men and women worked together in the labor-intensive process. Tiffany’s firm produced thousands of windows from the 1870s to 1920s for churches, mansions, libraries, theaters, and other venues.
Tiffany uses color to create a modeled effect in his Hibiscus and Parrots. The green in the parrots’ heads and the variegated plumage add realism to the scene. The artist orients surface striations created when the glass was mixed and stretched to suggest details in the feathers. Tiffany created a distinctive mottled glass that gives the impression of sunlight filtering through foliage in the lower half of the window. The analogous colors blue, green, and yellow dominate the artwork. The scene suggests streaming, dancing sunlight and a dreamy summer mood.
The influence of Japanese prints is evident in the composition of Hibiscus and Parrots. The plants create an all-over decorative surface pattern cropped at the edges in an asymmetrical composition. The birds are the focal point of the work. The curves of their wings suggest a circle, visually linking them. Tiffany crafted this stained glass work at an intimate scale that is meant for a house. The subject shows Tiffany’s love for nature and likely complemented his client’s garden.