Florida Art Museum to Expand

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Fla., the most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany materials in the world, will open a new 12,000-square-foot wing in February 2011. The addition will provide, for the first time, long-term public access to the recently restored Daffodil Terrace from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s celebrated Long Island home, Laurelton Hall. The new galleries will also feature approximately 250 art and architectural objects from or related to the long-lost estate. Highlights include prize-winning leaded-glass windows and iconic Tiffany Studios lamps as well as art glass and custom furnishings.

The new Laurelton Hall galleries will provide 6,000 square feet of additional public exhibition space and will deepen the Morse’s interpretations of Tiffany’s life and legacy. Laurelton Hall, every room and architectural detail designed and controlled by Tiffany, was destroyed by fire in 1957. The 11 new galleries at the Morse will showcase surviving components of Laurelton Hall’s dining room, living room and reception hall—also known as the Fountain Court—as well as other rooms, creating a uniquely immersive experience.

“The new galleries will suggest aspects of the actual rooms designed and decorated by Tiffany during his lifetime,” said Laurence J. Ruggiero, director of the Morse Museum. “Visitors can no longer go to Laurelton Hall to appreciate Tiffany’s approach to design, but they can come to the Morse and, we hope, gain a more holistic sense of the man, his aesthetic, and the power of his imagination.”

“Laurelton Hall was Tiffany’s masterpiece, and it housed a self-curated collection of Tiffany Studios’ production,” said Curator and Collection Manager Jennifer Perry Thalheimer. “The objects he put in his home and the way he arranged them reflected his perpetual quest for beauty.”

The Daffodil Terrace, installed in a new glass-enclosed gallery, will serve as a focal point for the new wing. The 18-by-32-foot outdoor terrace exemplifies Tiffany’s exotic and extravagant style. Supported by eight 11-foot marble columns that are topped with bouquets of glass daffodils, the terrace’s coffered ceiling is composed of hundreds of stenciled wood elements and molded tiles in three bays. The central bay features a skylight covered by six large panels of iridescent-glass tiles in a pear-tree motif. The terrace, pieced together from more than 600 distinct parts and fragments, is the museum’s most significant conservation project since reassembling Tiffany’s chapel interior from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Highlights from the dining-room installation include: a 13.5-foot-high, mosaic-decorated marble mantelpiece that is one of Tiffany’s most forward-looking designs; a 25-foot-long Oriental rug; a domed leaded-glass chandelier 6.5 feet in diameter; and a suite of six leaded-glass Wisteria transoms.

Four leaded-glass panels depicting the four seasons are a focal point of the living room installation. These were part of a single large window from the Tiffany exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, for which the artist won a gold medal. The room will also feature five Turtleback-glass hanging lamps. Turtleback-glass tiles are unique to Tiffany Studios, pressed from iron molds and iridized while still hot to create a unique aesthetic.

After the Laurelton Hall fire in 1957, Hugh F. McKean and his wife, Jeannette, who together assembled the Morse Museum’s collection, salvaged architectural elements, windows and other objects from the ruins of the estate. Over the next four decades, they continued to search out and collect objects from the estate that earlier had been auctioned, sold or given away. The Morse is the largest single repository of surviving materials from Laurelton Hall. (407-645-5311, www.morsemuseum.org)