Tiffany Studios New York "Peony" Table Lamp

The shade of Tiffany’s Peony table lamp depicts two distinct cultivars: a Greek peony and a Japanese peony. To convey the richness of the Greek peony—a bloom favored by Neoclassical artists for its symmetry and restraint—Tiffany employed burgundy glass streaked with lapis. The candy-striped Japanese peony Shima Nishiki is rendered in cream glass veined with fuchsia. Across the shade, the flowers are shown at successive stages of growth, from bud to first bloom, full flowering, and eventual decline. As peony petals wilt, their veining darkens and their surfaces pucker; Tiffany’s glass selectors captured this effect through the use of stone-textured “granite” glass, which emphasizes both the collapse of form and the heightened articulation of venation.

The background and border are composed of golden amber glass streaked with magenta and blue. The top-down view of a peony set against a ground-like field of mottled brown glass recalls the Rasenstück, or “turf study,” a pictorial mode devoted to the close observation of a fragment of earth. By incorporating brown glass into the floral ground, Tiffany foregrounded the soil from which the flowers emerge, shifting the viewer’s perspective from the idealized bloom to the conditions of its growth. Central to the Rasenstück tradition was the elevation of the humble, an approach later embraced by nineteenth-century American Pre-Raphaelites, who championed the principle of “truth to nature.” In such studies, flowers and plants were depicted in direct relation to the soil that sustained them, resisting romanticization in favor of close, empirical observation.

This exceptional shade is paired with a chased pod base, whose sculptural form derives from the roots of an onion bulb, transforming organically into the curling fiddleheads of ferns.