The Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York, is currently hosting an exhibit featuring Louis C. Tiffany’s glass mosaics—perhaps less well-known than Tiffany’s stained glass now, but no less beautiful.
The mosaics were certainly appreciated in their day. In 1910, Edmund Buckley wrote about the wonderful Tiffany mosaics in Chicago, like those at the Chicago Public Library and at the department store Marshall Fields. According to Buckley,
Of the mighty works done in the last decade, the mightiest are the mosaics, about the last art-object one would expect to find in a new city, so associated is the n[o]tion of mosaic with medieval Europe.
Yet now, in the matter of modern mosaic, Chicago leads the civilized world!
In 1895, architectural planner Owen F. Aldis commissioned Tiffany’s studios to produce a large, four-foot tall mosaic frieze for Chicago’s Marquette Building…