Met Museum Unveils Nearly 120 Tiffany Drawings Never Studied in Depth

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting nearly 120 watercolor design drawings from the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany — works that, according to the museum, have never before been studied in depth.

The exhibition, Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany, showcases rare preparatory drawings created for commissions dating from the mid-1880s through the 1920s, in the United States and internationally. The stained-glass windows, lamps, mosaics and interiors that made Tiffany a hallmark of the Gilded Age all began as drawings produced by designers in his studios — not necessarily by Tiffany himself.

That last point is worth stressing, because the show quietly reframes authorship. Virtually everything produced in Tiffany's workshops, the museum notes, was the result of a collaborative process. The initial steps took place in the studio, where artists Tiffany hired — often émigrés and women — realized his vision. The names of those designers do not appear in the announcement.

What survived, and how much was lost?

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Tiffany Studios created thousands — or perhaps tens of thousands — of design drawings, according to the material promoting the show. The hedge is telling: nobody appears to know the full figure. The roughly 120 sheets on view, all from The Met's own collection, represent the fraction that survived and reached the museum.

The exhibition credits a decades-long conservation initiative with restoring the drawings to what the museum calls their full beauty. One case is documented on film: Paper Conservator Marina Ruiz Molina, working with Curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, treats a watercolor destined for a villa in Havana, Cuba, that suffered significant damage over time. The video shows the mechanics of the repair; it does not claim every drawing in the show needed such intervention.

Designs beside the finished works

Beyond the drawings themselves, the exhibition places stained-glass windows, mosaics, enamelwork and examples of the studio's iconic lamps side by side with their original designs. The pairing offers a rare view of the journey from conception to finished product for interiors and decorations made for grand mansions, civic and sacred spaces, and other buildings of America's Gilded Age — the post–Civil War era of unprecedented wealth accumulation.

The museum also promises new insights into the artists' process and design inspiration, and describes the drawings as a chance to peel back the layers of some of the most heralded creations from Tiffany's legendary studios. What those insights specifically are, the announcement leaves unstated; visitors will judge from the sheets themselves.

What does this change for the visitor? The finished Tiffany objects are already among the most familiar artefacts of American decorative art. The drawings give the anonymous studio hands — the émigrés and women who realized the vision — their first sustained institutional look, even if mostly without names attached.