Art: From Oyster Bay

One hundred and eighty-two works of art by nearly 100 artists and craftsmen went up on the walls of the American Art Association-Anderson Galleries last week in the eleventh annual exhibition of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. It was a good show, far better than that of many academies better known and more widely advertised. Mr. Tiffany himself, looking a little like the Old Man of the Sea, hobbled round the halls and presented the Foundation’s gold medal to a dapper young Italian with a very large cravat, Umberto Romano.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of Jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany, was born in New York Feb. 18, 1848, the year before the Gold Rush. Always interested in art, he studied painting under the elder George Inness, a talented exponent of what was known as the Hudson River School. Later he went abroad, studied in Paris, traveled and sketched extensively in Europe, Africa, the Levant. Here commenced his interest in decorative arts, particularly glassware, which led to his development of that heavy iridescent substance known as Tiffany Favrile Glass. His first U. S. exhibit, “A Dock Scene, Yonkers,” was in the National Academy of 1869. He became (and remains) Vice President and Art Director of Tiffany & Co., jewelers. He is president and founder of Tiffany Furnaces and Tiffany Studios, which have filled many a church, mausoleum, library, with windows artfully simulating oil paintings. He is one of the most revered patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose President Robert Weeks De Forest is his great & good friend.

Years ago he bought a large estate in Oyster Bay, L. I., hard by Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill. Here he designed and built an amazing house, “Laurelton Hall.” which looks a little like a M axfield Parrish palace, a little like a factory, is magnificently kept up and contains a mosaic chapel, greenhouses, fountains, innumerable stained glass windows, rubber trees, orchids, and, frightening to children, a colossal bronze crab.

He lives there still, alone with two trained nurses. In 1918, anxious to help young artists, he deeded the entire property to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, endowed it with $1,000,000, appointed a board of trustees, arranged that 50 young men and women artists should come each year to Laurelton Hall to paint, spend the summer.

The casual observer, knowing the taste of Mr. Tiffany, seeing on the board of trustees the names of such venerable gentlemen as Sculptor Daniel Chester French, Gem Expert George Frederick Kunz, Mural Painter Edwin Howland Blashfield, might imagine that the Foundation was a cradle only for the academic. The casual observer would be wrong. Resident Director and mainspring of the Tiffany Foundation is a sharp-eyed, kinetic, gnomelike person named Stanley Lothrop. It is an open secret that although the Foundation has an admissions committee which goes through the formality of inspecting the paintings submitted by candidates, most of the artists who go to Laurelton Hall for the summer are personally invited by Director Lothrop. Nearly all of them paint in the modern manner. There is only one restriction. At Laurelton Hall they must paint outdoors, from Nature. Every Saturday Founder Tiffany, dignified in his long grey beard and with an orchid in his buttonhole, inspects their work, politely puzzled.

Noticeable among undergraduates and alumni of the Tiffany Foundation is the large Latin population. Edmond Romulus Amateis and Kimon Nicolaides are friends, unofficial assistants of Director Lothrop. And though the roster contains such Nor dic names as Gerald Foster, Erna Lange, David McCosh, there is preponderance of others like Romano, Vincenzo D’Agostino, G. Prestopino to give a Florentine glitter to the art guild of Oyster Bay.