Louis Comfort Tiffany’s father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, was one of the co-founders of Tiffany & Co., a name we still associate the with finest decorative arts, silver, jewelry, and glass. But son Louis had other ideas. He wanted to make a life as a painter.
Tiffany, born in New York City in 1848, studied with two of the best American painters of the age: George Inness and Samuel Colman, second generation Hudson River School painters whose interest in the effects of light, as opposed to the representation of reality, caused them to be called Luminists.
Light would become Tiffany’s passion. At age 20, Tiffany made a journey to Europe to further his education, working with Léon Adolphe Auguste Belly in Paris. Belly was known for Islamist genre scenes—then described as —of North African people and places. These paintings inspired Tiffany to make his own way through Southern Europe and eventually to Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. On his return home, Tiffany exhibited his Near East canvases to great acclaim; he then began to paint
