The distance between New York’s Fifth Avenue and Bentonville, Arkansas, is considerable—perhaps in more ways than one. Yet the two worlds converge in a new exhibition at Crystal Bridges, an art museum located in the foothills of the Ozarks, about 30 miles from Fayetteville. On view through March 29, 2027, “Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination” pairs exceptional jewelry and gemstones on loan from the Tiffany Archives with paintings, glass, minerals, and sculpture from the Crystal Bridges permanent collection.
The idea for the exhibition started with Crystal Bridges’s recent acquisition of the Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), a vibrant glass window depicting a waterfall amid lush green foliage by Tiffany Studios. “In conversations with Tiffany & Co., we realized there were so many marvelous points of connection between our two institutions,” Jen Padgett, Crystal Bridges’s Windgate curator of craft, tells Galerie.
Selecting objects to articulate the exhibition’s nature theme involved an ongoing dialogue between Padgett and Victoria Reynolds, chief gemologist and vice president of high jewelry diamond and gemstone acquisition at Tiffany & Co. When it came to the jewelry, Padgett says she relied on the Tiffany archives team’s expertise to help tell the broader story of American art through the house’s iconic works and important gemstones.
“In some cases, the selections started with objects from The Tiffany Archives, then we looked to the Crystal Bridges collection for artworks that would be lively pairings,” says Padgett. “Fayum-Re by Nancy Graves, for example, provided such a dynamic comparison with Jean Schlumberger’s colorful vision of nature.”
Together Padgett and Reynolds were able to identify an array of synergies between Tiffany jewels and Crystal Bridges’s sculpture and artworks: Tiffany designer George Paulding Farnham’s famous enameled orchid brooches (1889-1893) reflect the same botanical inspirations that captivated painters like Martin Johnson Heade and William Jacob Hayes Sr. around the same time. Abstract paintings that emphasize line, form, and geometry, such as Carmen Herrera’s Cerulean and Leon Polk Smith’s New Moon for August, invite visitors to see the precision and alignment of gemstone facets in a new light. And the museum’s Art Nouveau-era Wisteria Table Lamp by Clara Driscoll for Tiffany Studios prompted conversations about Tiffany’s championing of female designers across the decades: “We were particularly excited about the stunning jewelry by Julia Munson and Meta Overbeck from The Tiffany Archives, which shows a subtle use of color and attention to floral details,” says Padgett.
Perhaps the most pronounced example of the natural world colliding with American ingenuity is the undeniable star of the exhibition: The Arkansas Diamond, a rough, octahedral diamond weighing 27.21 carats that was discovered in 1926 on a farm in Searcy, Arkansas, by then 11-year-old Alice Taylor Howell. “Howell kept it for two decades before sending it to Tiffany & Co. for evaluation,” says Renolds. “Recognizing its significance, the House acquired the diamond in 1946. Today, the Arkansas Diamond remains one of the largest diamonds ever discovered in the United States.”…