A Tiffany museum expands - Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Rarely does an artist-architect with unlimited means become his own patron. Louis Comfort Tiffany was such a man, and his eighty-four-room house Laurelton Hall built between 1902 and 1904 in Oyster Bay, Long Island, was the remarkable result. By all accounts, and even in old black-and-white and sepia period photographs, the house was a showcase for Tiffany's talents and interests, intensely idiosyncratic from the chimney in the form of a minaret to the smallest mosaic tile.

Laurelton Hall was filled to bursting with the products of Tiffany's studio--stained glass, woodwork, architectural elements, furniture, and decorative glass and ceramics objects, which were freely interspersed with the many exotic objects he had collected during his travels around the world.

Before his death in 1933 Tiffany had allocated funds to create an endowment that would support an art school, museum, and studio on the 580-acre estate. However, financial problems compelled the foundation to sell the freestanding contents of the house at auction in 1946, and in 1957 Laurelton Hall was largely destroyed by fire.

Hugh and Jeannette Genius McKean, passionate admirers of Tiffany, negotiated with one of his daughters who, for an agreed sum, allowed them to search through the rubble and remove whatever they deemed salvageable. The McKeans must have been prescient about the future of conservation techniques, for they picked up everything that looked like Tiffany, from column capitals to mosaic tesserae. These and many other Tiffany objects they collected became the nucleus of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida.

The objects that required the most extensive conservation, such as the chapel Tiffany created for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (and later moved to the grounds of Laurelton Hall), were stored in crates in a Florida warehouse for more than forty years. Last year the chapel was re-erected at the museum after a meticulous restoration that lasted ten years. Then in May of this year the museum opened three permanent galleries devoted to nearly one hundred architectural elements and objects known to have been at Laurelton Hall. To provide context, the galleries include historical photographs and architectural plans as well as a brief video of archival film footage about the house.

The chapel is a study in iridescent light and varied textures. It incorporates a series of arches decorated with glass insets; a stained-glass window of lilies two roundels, one of which is entitled The Story of the Cross; a semicircular stained-glass window with figural scenes that include the adoration of the magi; a baptismal font and lectern sheathed in glass mosaic; and a ten-foot-tall lighting device in the shape of a cross. The Morse Museum has long been known as a wonderful repository of Tiffany's work These new additions provide a rare opportunity to see objects Tiffany chose to live with and, in the case of the chapel, what he envisioned as a total work of art.