A glass act

Art Nouveau masters such as Louis Comfort Tiffany and Émile Gallé turned the most fragile of materials into iridescent masterpieces that shimmered like seashells or glittered like Byzantine mosaics, as Matthew Dennison discovers

- Matthew Dennison

VASES coloured like an autumn sky' caught the eye of the Italian correspondent of The Architectural Record at the Paris Exposition of 1900. They were the work of American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Italian reporter was not their only admirer: another critic celebrated their 'almost supernatural light', which he called 'as roseate as a sunset'. Glass vases produced by Tiffany's French contemporary Émile Gallé were equally commended, in the Journal of Glass Studies, as 'gems of enflamed transparencies, of bottomless blues, of congealed opals'. Iridescent, crackled and flashed, glass produced by luminaries of the Art Nouveau movement, resembling the shimmering interiors of seashells or the soft translucency of Roman unguentaria, inspired by Byzantine mosaics and medieval enamels, by shards of quartz and agate, has a glister, glamour and, in some instances, intensity of otherworldly colouring uniquely its own.