If you haven’t made it over to Winter Park’s Morse Museum of American Art yet this month, it’s a great time to go.
Three new exhibitions opened earlier this month and are well worth the trip, especially if you’re the kind of person who appreciates knowing the story behind the things on the wall.
Beyond Glass: The Paintings of Louis Comfort Tiffany is probably the most surprising of the three. Before Tiffany became synonymous with stained glass, he was a painter, studying under George Inness, showing at the National Academy of Design, and traveling through Europe and North Africa making oil and watercolor sketches. “I think many people are still surprised to learn that Louis C. Tiffany began his artistic career as a painter,” says Dr. Kayli Rideout, the Morse’s Hugh F. McKean Curator. “His work in painting is particularly important because it helped him formulate ideas about the representation of light and color, as well as his defiance of traditional academic hierarchies of art.”
One painting worth seeking out is Children at the Beach, a tiny 5-by-8-inch study showing three children rendered in quick, expressive brushstrokes. You can even see streaks of paint on the side where Tiffany wiped his brush mid-session. Since much of Tiffany’s personal and business records haven’t survived, Rideout says pieces like this offer a rare and intimate window into his process and who he was as a working artist…