Florida gets first look at Tiffany glass

ORLANDO - The last major art works from the estate of American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany will go on permanent display for the first time in February at Florida’s Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.

A new 6,000-square-foot gallery at the Winter Park museum will be opened on Feb. 19, nearly 54 years after a fire destroyed Laurelton Hall, the turn-of-the-century New York home of Tiffany, who was best known for his leaded glass works.

The gallery will house the surviving components of the estate, including the reassembled Daffodil Terrace, an outdoor room marked by eight 11-foot (3.4 meter) marble columns topped with wreaths of glass flowers and covered by a cedar, tile and glass ceiling.

“Laurelton Hall was not simply another house that he did,” said Laurence J. Ruggiero, the director of the museum. “Tiffany saw this as a statement about art and philosophy and an attitude about life.”

Over the past five years, the museum has been developing the new gallery designed to display Tiffany’s remaining large-scale works in a manner that suggests their placement at his estate, as well as his love of natural beauty and his style of blurring the line between indoors and outdoors.

The gallery will also include 250 objects from or related to the estate.

The Daffodil Terrace will be displayed in a glassed-in alcove to recreate the feel of the original outdoor space.

“It’s bathed in natural light for the first time since it was taken from the estate,” said Catherine Hinman, the museum’s director of public affairs.

As it did at Laurelton Hall, the terrace flows directly into a recreation of the estate’s dining room, which includes a nearly 14-foot high mosaic mantelpiece, 25-foot long Oriental carpet and a suite of six leaded-glass wisteria transoms.

Hugh F. McKean, an artist who had been a fellow-in-residence at the estate, rescued the works from the wreckage of the 1957 fire along with his wife Jeannette, who founded the Florida museum named for her grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse.

Reuters Life!