China tiffany lamp, Stained glass,tiffany lamp factory- China Chamber of commerce of Tiffany lamps Manufacturer

Tiffany's lifelong fascination with light led to his innovations in stained glass but also inspired him to find new ways to incorporate electric lighting into his designs. Beginning in 1885, with his work on the Lyceum Theatre in New York, Tiffany pioneered the artistic adaptation of the light bulb. A few years later he created distinctive metalwork and blown-glass lighting fixtures for the Havemeyer house, but it was not until 1899 that he publicly introduced his first table lamps with bulbs shielded by colorful leaded-glass shades.

The majority of Tiffany lampshades were essentially leaded-glass windows wrapped around a light source. Composed of intricate arrangements of semitranslucent pieces, they were perfect complements for early electric bulbs, shielding the eyes from the bright light and directing it downward. They provided soft illumination inside a delightfully artistic object.

Although designed and constructed in much the same way as the windows, the shades differed in that each was assembled on a solid wooden form and utilized a prescribed cartoon to indicate the shapes of the individual pieces of glass. For custom-made lighting, several sketches might be drawn. Once the composition was approved, it was translated into a watercolor cartoon, with thick dark outlines indicating the placement of the leading. The cartoons often show only a section of the design, which was repeated several times around the shade. This process resulted in a certain amount of conformity among the shades produced at Tiffany Studios. The degree to which they varied depended upon the palette and the different kinds of glass selected. Each artisan needed a painter's sense of color to balance the multitude of subtle chromatic nuances, as he or she selected and joined literally hundreds of pieces into complex compositions. It took a skilled worker as long as a week just to choose and cut the hundreds of pieces of glass.

By 1906 more than 125 shades could be ordered from Tiffany Studios; prices ranged from $30 for lamps with small shades in geometric designs to $750 for those with most elaborate floral patterns. Even at the lower price range, the lamps were considered luxury goods.

Despite their great appeal, Tiffany remained ambivalent about his lamps. The leaded-glass shades were left out of his lavish biography by Charles de Kay, which included every other medium in which he worked. His plan of designing unique decorative objects for the home conflicted philosophically with the manufacture of items, such as the shades, in multiples. The patterns, models, and increasing volume of orders led to uniformity, and the dichotomy of the reproduced object and the ideal of a unique work of art must have been difficult for Tiffany to reconcile in his role as a creative artist.

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