Strolling through the corridors of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art was an amazing experience that offers an unexpected enjoyment to its visitors. The Morse Museum houses the world’s most complete collection of art works by the American designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany. The museum has the most important compilation of American paintings during the nineteenth and twentieth century and excellent collections of American art pottery, decorative and graphics arts. The museum also features several installations such as the iconic Tiffany lamps, restored Daffodil Terrace, the award-winning glass windows made with lead and traditional fixtures.
The place shows a great support to the first undying presentation of various items. In my opinion, the most fascinating element of the Morse Museum is Tiffany’s collection. Tourist attractions consist of the Byzantine-Romanesque chapel restored interior. Louis Comfort Tiffany made this interior for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the year 1893. The interior contains an original wing that displays the Museum’s assortment of architectural items and arts from the renowned Long Island residence of Tiffany in Laurelton Hall.
The tiffany’s collection of artworks seems to be a documentary of the designer’s life. Seeing his works is like reading his diary and uncovering his secrets. The collection includes all mediums that Tiffany has used and all types of work he made from any stage in his lifetime. Tiffany has made a set of leaded-glass window, Favrile blown glass and glass buttons. There are also jewelry, mosaics, lamps, watercolors, furniture and enamels.
Spring panel from the Four Seasons window
I would like to highlight one artwork from the Tiffany’s collection and this is the “Spring panel from the four seasons window. It was a part of the magnificent window that depicts the four seasons and it first appeared at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was an extarordinary way of Tiffany’s representation of the cyclic progression of nature. The window has a bunch of multicolored tulips that represents the earth’s replenishment or rebirth. Tiffany separated the four panels of his Four Seasons window for exhibition at his Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall. The four major panels were put into the living room whereas the border panels were positioned in the garden opening of the reception hall.
The glass window is completely made of plated, textured and colored glass, with no decorated accompaniments. The leaded-glass panels signify the utmost accomplishment in glassmaking. Being a work of art, the spring panel represents the impressive organization of life, of beginning, maturity, bereavement, and resurrection. Today, the artwork still exists with every dazzling rudiment. The panels linger to be the central works in appreciating Tiffany’s brilliance, modernization. Most of all, they stay as items of superb exquisiteness.
The Morse museum indicates that if items were once more created by the designers and finished by hand, happiness in manual labor would be re-established and slapdash labor would fade away. Practitioners of Arts and crafts prefer answers that had progress as an answer to confined atmosphere and natural features. By means of integrating resources specific to a region and reflecting customs, structures were designed to fit into the scenery.
The collected works at the Morse Museum demonstrate the objectives of the arts. It is to revive the hand craftsmanship, to create a more fulfilling working environment, to elevate the attractive arts to the rank of fine arts by means of design harmony.
Works Cited
Kahn, E. “Resurrecting Laurelton Hall." New York Times, 2010.
The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall. Winter Park: Charles Hosmer Morse Foundation Inc, 2011.
