United States, New York (Corona)
Tiffany Furnaces; Louis Comfort Tiffany (designer)

With its huge, brilliantly colored blossom rising from an impossibly long and thin stem, Tiffany’s remarkable blue luster vase is breathtaking. The flower’s edge is textured with fine lines and crackles that suggest living plant tissue, as its undulating shape maximizes the effects of light on the colorful iridescent glass.

Although known as a “jack-in-the-pulpit” vase, it actually bears little resemblance to that plant. During the second half of the 19th century, glass manufacturers were drawn to the novelty of making flower vases as realistic versions of the plants themselves. In the Art Nouveau period at the turn of the 20th century, however, glass designers like Tiffany took a more intense, artistic view of natural forms, creating idealized and sinuous organic shapes.

Favrile glass, blown, about 1913
Gift of Helen and Harold McMaster, 1986.62