This shimmering, elaborately-decorated punch bowl was made to be admired rather than used.
Louis Comfort Tiffany, Punch Bowl with Three Ladles, 1900, glass, silver, gilding, copper, and wood, bowl 36.8 x 61 cm, ladle 6.4 x 8.9 x 25.4 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). Speakers: Celeste Fetta, Joan P. Brock Director of Education and Assistant Deputy Director for Education, Statewide and The Library, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Beth Harris, Smarthistory
0:00:05.3 Beth Harris: We’re standing in the galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in a room filled with decorative arts, stained glass windows, lamps by Tiffany, and the centerpiece is this punch bowl. But I admit it’s not what I typically think of when I think of a utilitarian punch bowl.
0:00:26.0 Celeste Fetta: And it’s most likely [that] it was never used. This is meant to be seen and admired and awed at.
0:00:33.7 Beth Harris: It is silver and gold and has these colored bosses and forms that seem to grow and other forms that seem to melt. It takes my eye some time to make sense of what I’m looking at.
0:00:47.8 Celeste Fetta: We know it’s metal with silver gilts, but it’s oozing almost.
0:00:52.3 Beth Harris: These forms on the bottom seem to be moving toward us.
0:00:56.9 Celeste Fetta: So it’s moving towards us, but then rippling back. And right above that oozing shape are these crests of waves that look much more solid. And coming out in between the waves are these, what are these?
0:01:08.8 Beth Harris: That’s a really good question. And I was looking at them closely and noticing how different they are from the wave-like forms because they are so precise and geometric, and also have a color sheen to them.
0:01:22.5 Celeste Fetta: And each of them is a different color combination. They rise up from the wider base and then do a nice little curlicue right at the top. To me, they are octopus tendrils that come out reaching for something. And so coming off those tendrils is where we get to that pièce de résistance, the big show.
0:01:41.0 Beth Harris: And I’m thinking about this idea of liquid and how that’s appropriate for something that held liquid.
0:01:48.9 Celeste Fetta: And that’s what this is. It’s a giant punch bowl. And it’s a hand-blown punch bowl. So the center of this, that it’s going to hold whatever punch you care to put in it, is that hand blown Favrile glass. And Favrile is a word based on Latin for fabrilis or handmade. And that’s what Tiffany’s trying to get across. It’s moving away from this industrial machine-made product, coming back to useful but beautiful decorative arts, functional works of art being handmade. And Tiffany’s also a very good marketer. So he switches fabril, fabrilis, the Latin for handmade, and puts a V instead of the B, Favrile because it just sounds more French.
0:02:32.0 Beth Harris: It sounds very luxurious. This is a kind of glass where the color was embedded in the glass itself.
0:02:38.4 Celeste Fetta: There’s also a special chemical that’s applied, so when it’s fired, it creates this really luminescent sheen that you’re seeing in the bowl, in the tendrils, in the ladles that are also handblown, made of glass. And then the silver mounts encase the bowl. And around the silver mounts, where you see the joins of the silver coming together, are these little cabochons and then these bigger cabochons around the lip or the edges. And they look a little bit like snail shells. So you still have this underwater motif, Art Nouveau, based on nature, and those swooping curves.
0:03:15.2 Beth Harris: It’s such an interesting term, Art Nouveau. This is the name we give this style, but it means “new art.”
0:03:22.4 Celeste Fetta: And actually was coined by Bing, who represented Tiffany in France. So he had a shop called L’Art Nouveau and that’s where he showcased the most up and coming designers of the time. So this is right after Japan had opened up. We’re seeing Japanese prints come in and objects come in. And so it’s all these influences coming in to create this new art.
0:03:41.6 Beth Harris: One that wasn’t based on historical precedents, but finding something that spoke to a new modern era of cities and transportation and industry, but also at the same time feeling the loss that accompanied modern industry of handmade, thoughtfully made goods, goods that weren’t mass produced in a factory. This openness to these international influences, that’s important for Art Nouveau.
0:04:12.3 Celeste Fetta: Tiffany himself collected objects from the past, from different cultures to help with his inspirations. So we know he had metalwork from Japan. We know he had ancient Cypriot vases, Roman vases that had that iridescent sheen. So he’s incorporating all these things into his thought process. And this punch bowl was made for the 1900 Great Exposition in Paris as their tour de force piece for Tiffany’s booth. This was front and center in a case and helped him win a gold medal at the fair. So it was really the culmination of the experimentation of glass, that innovation, his design aesthetic, the craftsmanship of the glassblowers and the silver makers, the mount makers, all rolled into one to really show off who Tiffany was.
