At Sarasota’s Selby Gardens, Tiffany glass and nature inspire each other

Jun 01, 2024

SARASOTA — Colorful patterns dance across the grounds and beds of flowers outside at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, while the stained glass Tiffany lamps that inspired them glow softly inside.

The new exhibition, “Tiffany: The Pursuit of Beauty in Nature,” showcases the symbiotic relationship between nature and art.

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was an American artist and designer who was inspired by nature, so it’s fitting he would be the subject of the latest installment at Selby Gardens. The artist’s stained glass windows and lamps can be seen in the Museum of Botany & the Arts, and horticultural displays inspired by them are woven throughout the Tropical Conservatory and gardens.

Tiffany’s works are most often associated with Art Nouveau. In the late 1800s, he founded a series of interior design and decorative art companies, and eventually Tiffany Studios.

His father was Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the iconic Tiffany and Co. jewelry firm. After he died, Louis Comfort stepped in as artistic director, while still managing Tiffany Studios. He would put his objects on sale at Tiffany and Co. and also started making jewelry, but favored semiprecious stones over diamonds.

The exhibit technically ends in the Museum of Botany & the Arts, but some viewers may appreciate the gardens’ vignettes more after seeing Tiffany’s stained glass first. These sculptural leaded glass table lamps are stunningly vibrant and emblematic of Art Nouveau, with sinuous lines and nature motifs. Tiffany’s glassmaking process was also innovative, said David Berry, Selby’s chief museum curator.

“In this case, chemicals that are producing certain colors are mixed together when the glass is in its molten state, so it isn’t color applied to glass,” he said. “It’s color that is integral to glass. So if you take a piece of Tiffany glass and you cut it and look at it in cross section, the colors run all the way through it, not applied superficially.”

Berry said that while Tiffany draws on earlier traditions, his innovative process “elevated the art of glassmaking to new heights.”

Tiffany started out as a successful interior designer and decorator and produced works to furnish those interiors, Berry said. This cool dragonfly form was also created for practicality. People of the era who could afford them would use these Tiffany Studios screens to prevent glare by hanging them over the top of a lamp.

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The horticultural team — Mike McLaughlin, Angel Lara and Nathan Burnaman — has worked its magic to interpret Tiffany works in plants and innovative outdoor display pieces created in-house. The “glass” material in these pieces is Rowlux, a thermoplastic film with an iridescent quality. Burnaman said the use of the material is a nod to Tiffany’s appreciation of opalescence in glass. In this vignette, orchids planted in driftwood highlight the panel made to look like a window.

The flowers rotate on this display, casting light in different colors that illuminate the crushed shell and other plants. The range of lighting also changes during the day. Throughout the Tropical Conservatory, beds of colorful plants mimic Tiffany mosaics.

Panels cast psychedelic light onto the cactus and succulent garden, with the design inspired by the shape of a plant called the agave Americana, Burnaman said.

“We really wanted to provide a vignette that casts color, light and shadow,” he said. “It also allows you to look through and appreciate the garden that’s already here, through a colored filter and a new lens. So you can look at all these bromeliads, cacti ... agaves in here and you can appreciate them all in a different way, depending on what you’re looking for.”

A gazebo display titled “Living Lampshade” beckons to be photographed. You can walk around the 90 hand-cut, orchid-shaped, Tiffany-esque acrylic pieces, which cast light and shadow not only on the shell walkway, but also on the flowers in the bed planted there.

“You sort of get a weird lesson in color theory as you’re looking at yellow flowers which have a pink shadow on them and then turn orange,” Burnaman said.

Bromeliads planted in the negative space in the roots of the garden’s iconic Moreton Bay fig tree strongly recall a Tiffany lampshade. It’s aptly titled “Rooted in Nature.”

“We made a map of all the pockets within this tree and use that same concept of mosaic, parts together, forming a whole and use different color,” McLaughlin said. “It makes a living tree lampshade, if you will.”

“Tiffany: The Pursuit of Beauty in Nature” is on view through June 25. $11-$26, free for children 4 and younger. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, 1534 Mound St., Sarasota. 941-366-5731. selby.org.