AS a teenage aesthete, Louis Comfort Tiffany started making trips abroad to paint in the 1860s, paid for with his inheritance from the family jewelry business. For six decades he regularly took long vacations to sketch. In the Middle East, he painted camel caravans, pyramids and mosque doorways. On trips around America, he set up his easel at Long Island cow pastures, Yellowstone canyons and Pacific Northwest redwoods.
About 125 of his landscapes and streetscapes can be seen through March 18 in “The Paintings of Louis Comfort Tiffany: Works From a Long Island Collection,” at the Nassau County Museum of Art. The paintings are from collectors who have requested anonymity.
Tiffany had too many other interests to stick with a career as a nomadic fine artist. By the 1870s he was experimenting with new glass formulas for windows and vases, and he soon diversified into furnishings ranging from inkwells to altarpieces. The scenery he painted inspired his designs for flowing, iridescent products that were made at his factory in Corona, Queens, and marketed at his Madison Avenue showroom. After his signature style went out of fashion in the 1910s, he kept painting in retirement at his Long Island estate near Oyster Bay.
“I have always striven to fix beauty in wood or stone or glass or pottery, in oil or water colour, by using whatever seemed fittest,” Tiffany wrote in a 1916 magazine article.
In seven galleries on two floors, the museum has grouped the paintings by subject matter, clustering waterfalls, harbors, nymphs, Arab soldiers and palm trees. Their styles vary widely; Tiffany was a chameleon, inspired by artists ranging from Thomas Cole to Childe Hassam. His sunsets are just streaks of bleeding color, while a panorama of an Egyptian temple “almost comes out like an archaeological study,” said Jean Henning, the museum’s senior educator.
The museum has also borrowed a dozen objects from the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in Queens and the Lillian Nassau gallery, including windows with farmyard and tropical scenes and stained-glass lamps with daffodil and dogwood patterns.
Tiffany incorporated a few direct references to his own products in his artworks. Stained-glass windows light gloomy rooms in his interior views, and bouquets in his still lifes are gathered in iridescent vases like the ones he sold on Madison Avenue.
The collectors who own the paintings in the show did not reply to e-mail inquiries, sent through a museum press representative, about what inspired their obsession and how they acquired and displayed the art. A number of their paintings can be traced on the Web to recent auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Swann Auction Galleries, at prices in the four and five figures.
The holdings are apparently unrivaled. “I’m not aware of another collection out there of this size,” said Arlie Sulka, the owner of the Lillian Nassau gallery in Manhattan. Tiffany buyers, she added, typically want just one or two of his canvases and watercolors to complement the glass and ceramic works.
The collectors lending their paintings to the Nassau County show seem to have a particular fondness for depictions of a vanished landmark that stood not far east of the museum: Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Shangri-La of a country house, which was the subject of a lavish show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art five years ago. The house was a stuccoed mass of minarets and chimneys that Tiffany had built on Cold Spring Harbor in 1905. He visited year-round from his home on Manhattan’s East Side, employed dozens of servants and hosted lavish parties, but otherwise he wanted privacy on his 580 acres. He constantly battled the local government to keep the public off his beach.
