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Michael McLeod
here you go, Jim, if you are in need of reading material.
This might interest you and others.
It's one of several stories I wrote about Louis Comfort Tiffany, the millionaire stained glass impresario, and a museum devoted to his work.
I wrote several stories about him over the years as he -- and his fabulous stained glass creations - have an orlando connection.
this is a story I wrote when the Orlando Tiffany museum loaned some of his masterworks to the Met in NYC for an exhibit, and my editor at the Orlando Sentinel sent me to NYC to cover it.
That was a hell of a nice assignment but my memory of the trip has faded.
Fortunately I've got this story to pique that memory.
The small but fabulous Tiffany museum I mention in the story is in Winter Park - that's a pretty little upscale town where I live near Orlando - and it's well worth a visit to you and anyone else who might be coming down here to the sunshine state for a visit.
TIFFANY’S WORLD COMES HOME
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By Michael Mcleod
NEW YORK — It would grieve Louis Comfort Tiffany to discover that his cherished Long Island mansion disappeared long ago.
But he would be elated to see its luminous reincarnation, as arranged by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Today the Met, in partnership with the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, opens a six-month exhibition devoted to Laurelton Hall, the enchanted, 600-acre enclave that was both a home and a life’s work. Tiffany designed it, then filled it with creations of his own and collections from afar, representing his lifelong quest for beauty.
On Monday, representatives from the Morse previewed “Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall — An Artist’s Country Estate.” The exhibit’s 250-plus objects and architectural remnants include 27 of the lush, innovative leaded-glass windows that brought Tiffany international acclaim. It represents the first full-blown effort since an abandoned Laurelton Hall burned nearly to the ground in 1957 to explore what it represented to Tiffany, and recapture its bygone elegance.
“What you can see here for the first time is how Tiffany worked with scale,” said Morse director Larry Ruggiero. “He was equally comfortable working with large spaces and with the most delicate things.”
Ruggiero and the small party of Morse staffers felt a bit like visitors to a home that had been decorated with their own furniture. About half of the Met exhibit consists of loans from the Morse Museum.
By combining the Met’s extensive Tiffany collection with that of the Morse, and by bringing in other priceless Tiffany artifacts from museums and private collections, curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen has created a startling tribute — startling because Tiffany is revered but pigeonholed. He is associated almost exclusively with glass when in fact his range of materials was much broader.
This is Tiffany in three dimensions — an exhibit that shows how he worked as an artist and designer with interiors to make visitors feel as if they had just walked into one of his stained-glass creations.
“The sheer beauty of Tiffany is overwhelming,” said Frelinghuysen. “There were many times, as we were working on the exhibit, that I would look up and see someone on the staff just staring.”
The dining-room display illustrates how Tiffany carefully coordinated color. Six stained-glass transoms depict wisteria in bloom. A massive, blue leaded-glass ceiling echoes the pattern in the rug beneath the dining-room table and the upholstery of the dining-room chairs. An oil painting of ducks reflects the same color combination.
The majority of the windows and architectural fragments in the exhibit are from the treasure trove salvaged from the ruins of Laurelton Hall by Hugh and Jeannette Genius McKean, the Winter Park couple who founded the Morse Museum. Hugh, who died in 1995, had visited Laurelton Hall to study under Tiffany as a promising young painter in 1930.
An audio guide that accompanies the exhibit features Hugh McKean’s tape-recorded voice, extolling the grandeur of the mansion’s Fountain Court, which featured a multicolored fountain and a pipe organ, and where Tiffany often entertained his guests:
“With the pipe organ going full blast and the fountains changing color and the bear rugs on the floor and the fountain water stream running through the house, it was to see Louis Tiffany under the most favorable circumstances,” McKean rhapsodizes. “He was living out beauty and he was handing it on to other young people. That was his great dream.”
The Fountain Court is one of several areas of Laurelton Hall that are evoked in the exhibit, which begins with an enlarged photo of Laurelton Hall flanked by two Qing Dynasty lions from Tiffany’s substantial collection of Asian art.
The lions lead the way to a series of galleries suggesting early Tiffany residences and possessions, including an ornately inlaid piano, on loan to the Met from one of Tiffany’s descendents.
A gallery is devoted to Tiffany’s collections, which included oriental thrones and armor. Another depicts the “forest room” or living hall, which Tiffany designed to have a sense of a refuge in deep woods, with heavy, green-glass lighting fixtures hung from an iron yoke, and stained-glass windows depicting scenes from nature. The most conspicuous of these windows are the Four Seasons, a luminous and ingeniously wrought depiction of spring, summer, winter and fall that brought him international attention when it was displayed at a Paris exhibition in 1900.
The largest part of the exhibit is the Daffodil Terrace, which was just outside the dining room in Laurelton Hall. The terrace consists of eight 11-foot-tall Italian-marble columns, topped with wreaths of opalescent glass daffodils, and a coffered ceiling of iridescent glass panels and stenciled tiles.
“I think people will walk into this exhibit and say, ‘Wow. He did all this?’ ” said Jennifer Thalheimer, collections manager for the Morse.
Her fascination with Laurelton Hall dates to her childhood, when she grew up near the still-elegant ruins of the mansion.
Years later, Thalheimer is one of the full-time caretakers of what remains of Tiffany’s treasures. She spent hour after hour engaged in the painstaking, meticulous process of packing the Morse’s priceless collection to send off to the Met. Then she flew to New York to spend two weeks unpacking it. She will be involved in a reversal of that process when it all heads back to Winter Park in six months.
“It’s a lot of work,” she said. “But it’s home.”
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