On October 17, the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, FL., opens two new exhibitions celebrating Louis Comfort Tiffany’s creative spirit and the creative process at Tiffany Studios.

Louis Comfort Tiffany—Impressions on Film, Canvas, and Paper is an exhibition of Tiffany’s personal photographs, paintings, and watercolors that provides an intimate view of the innovator who built the artistic empire of Tiffany Studios. While Tiffany’s famous works in glass dazzle, Tiffany the man found inspiration in the simple beauty of everyday life, farm scenes, children playing in the surf, and boats on the Hudson River.

Tiffany Studios Designs will feature drawings, photographs, and sketches for a selection of the astonishingly diverse objects that his firm made available to the Gilded Age’s elite and discriminating consumer. Both shows are organized from the Museum’s extensive collection of Tiffany works. Tiffany was an artist as well as a visionary. Throughout his life he was an active painter and photographer.

Louis Comfort Tiffany—Impressions on Film, Canvas, and Paper draws on the Museum’s collection of Tiffany’s less well known two-dimensional works, examples that are poetic in character—sometimes joyous, sometimes elegiac. Tiffany, who traveled broadly, was unceasingly engaged with his visual environment, recording his impressions with camera, brush, and pen.

Through the exhibit of Tiffany designs, which range from windows to baptismal fonts, visitors will gain some understanding of an inspired but complex organization. Under Louis Comfort Tiffany’s careful watch, Tiffany Studios’ talented designers and craftspeople translated the artist’s all-encompassing aesthetic vision into some of the most stunning and luminous objects of our time.

The Morse Museum, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, is home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933). These include not only lamps, windows, art glass, pottery, and paintings, but the chapel interior he designed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and art and architectural elements from his Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall. The collection also includes American art pottery, paintings, and decorative art.  For more information, call (407) 645-5311 or visit www.morsemuseum.org