There’s a lot of ‘Americana’ in the Orlando area, including at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, but there’s also a great museum for American Art not that far away, in Winter Park, just north of downtown Orlando.
We visited it on our travel day after a week in Disney World, and it was a wonderful transition back to the ‘real world’ for us.
The museum, officially the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, has, among other things, the largest collection anywhere of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the museum’s excellent exhibits and narrative make it clear how much more he was than just ‘the lamp man.’
Although, of course, the Museum has many, many of the lamps made by the Tiffany Studio. Designed by Tiffany and guest artists, they were actually made by teams of workers assigned to different departments: glass matchers, metalworkers and more. There are displays showing the process and tools; that was one of the most fascinating parts of the museum.
How the museum came to be the such a big Tiffany site is a story in itself. The museum was founded by Jeannette McKean, granddaughter of Charles Hosmer Morse (who made his money in Fairbanks and Morse, the big industrial machinery company). McKean’s husband, Hugh McKean was a professor (and later President) at Rollins College, and the museum started on the campus in 1942.
In 1955, the Museum organized some of the first serious exhibitions of Tiffany’s work since his death 20 years before. So, when a fire destroyed Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall estate on Long Island, Tiffany’s daughter turned to the museum for help in salvaging what remained. Hugh McKean had spent a summer of his youth as a student at Laurelton.
The McKeans found that the house was a total ruin, but that much of the artwork had been stacked in another building and survived, including the incredible chapel that Tiffany had designed for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (not as a place of worship, by the way, but as the centerpiece for companies selling church goods). Below, some more of the chapel-related glass.
They organized trucks to move everything they could to Florida, where it was added to the Museum’s already-significant Tiffany trove. The chapel was restored and re-installed as designed for the first time in decades. And, eventually, a new wing was added to the museum to recreate rooms from Laurelton Hall.
But the Tiffany work is not all glass; there’s an extensive collection of his ceramics as well, and even a few paintings.
In addition to the domestic pieces in ceramics, there are many glass pieces that are for use rather than display. Or so it would have seemed to those who bought it for their opulent homes or wedding gifts.
One of the museum’s temporary exhibits, interestingly enough, was a display and catalog of gifts from Jeannette McKean’s mother’s wedding…and many of them were, in fact from Tiffany. For those who wonder, by the way, Louis Comfort Tiffany was the son of Charles Tiffany, founder of the eponymous jewelry store, and Louis Tiffany eventually became its design director.
There’s similar Art Nouveau era work by other artists, and a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American paintings…some with snarky commentary by Hugh McKean, who was a perceptive critic, and puncturer of inflated egos and patronizing experts, as can be seen in the comments below about criticism of Rosa Bonheur’s painting.
There’s also a variety of works by other 19th century and early 20th century American artists, including these two portraits by John Singer Sargent.
Among the works that were part of Tiffany’s own estate at Laurelton Hall, the museum has a variety of free-standing pieces as well as some shown in recreated rooms, like the cycle of seasons here.
