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While perhaps most popularly known for his stained glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany in fact first trained and worked as a painter, traveling and working alongside artists like George Inness, Samuel Colman, Leon-Adolphe-Auguste Belly, and Robert Swain Gifford. In the late 1870s Tiffany began to shift his focus to decorative arts, interiors, and glassmaking, but he never fully turned away from painting as a medium for more personal expression. The present work dates from his later period and reflects Tiffany’s enduring fondness for the media of both painting and decoration, as well as the fusion of the two.
The present work appears in the 1919 inventories of Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s sprawling Long Island home which he completed in 1905. Laurelton Hall was an 84-room, 600-acre Art Nouveau estate with an Islamic facade housing an artists’ school, a chapel, an art gallery, and many of Tiffany’s artworks and stained glass windows. The home fell into disrepair after Tiffany’s death, and the home, its contents, and its land were sold in 1946 and 1949. Laurelton was destroyed in a fire in 1957. Texto da Bonhams.
