Window on a Lush Life

By STUART FERGUSON

Winter Park, Fla.

In the Morse Museum of American Art’s jaw-dropping 12,000-square-foot wing devoted to Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s huge estate on the North Shore of Long Island, there are layers and layers—of materials, of meaning, of history. A walk through the first-floor galleries (upstairs are offices and an expanded library) with museum curator Jennifer Perry Thalheimer made clear how Tiffany’s blue-and-white dining room—the original seated 150—with its marble mantle, unadorned except for its three built-in clocks telling the hour, day and month, related to the outdoor Daffodil Terrace, which in turn connected the house with its gardens, whose pond, pools and streams were fed by water from inside the house.

Laurelton’s three-story reception hall was the fountain court, seemingly right out of the Alhambra. Liquid pouring from the mouth of a tall, narrow vase into its basin—continually changing hues thanks to the rotations of an underwater pair of lead, brass and glass color wheels—was the source for elaborate hydraulics that sent a stream flowing through a rill that pierced the exterior wall to feed outside water features of the 580-acre estate, itself overlooking Cold Spring Harbor. The main house was built from 1902 to 1905 and had 84 rooms, including a smoking room where Tiffany could puff away under a mural depicting an opium dream. There also were accommodations for student artists; greenhouses; a bowling alley; a working farm; and a lighted, cork-lined tunnel leading to the beach on Long Island Sound.

Tiffany (1848-1933), son of the founder of the famous jewelry store, began his career as an Orientalist painter. His travels in North Africa inspired the smokestack-disguised-as-minaret at Laurelton Hall, the detailed architect’s model of which survived the 1957 fire that gutted the mansion, as did those color wheels in the fountain. So, too, did an elaborately carved pair of massive teakwood doors that granted entrance to the estate’s art gallery. They came from India, and were imported by the decorating firm Tiffany operated with the artist and furniture designer Lockwood de Forest. In all, more than 250 art and architectural objects associated with the estate are on view in the Morse’s new wing.

Having already designed the interiors of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Conn., and Chester A. Arthur’s White House (not to mention his own residences in New York City), Tiffany knew the effects he wanted inside Laurelton Hall. Of course, Louis Comfort Tiffany is most famous for the stained-glass windows and lighting featuring his patented opalescent glassmaking techniques. Among the examples here from Laurelton Hall are the wisteria transoms in the dining room; the living room’s “Maiden feeding flamingoes in the court of a Roman house” window; and the earthy “Pumpkin and beets,” depicting those humble root vegetables with a rich, jewel-like intensity. While the show includes lampshades and chandeliers galore, along with vases, furniture and architectural drawings, it’s the 1898 glass-and-bronze, scarab-shaped reading lamp, green and glowing on Tiffany’s living-room work table, that would have tempted Salvador Dalí to larceny.

Period photographs and watercolors executed by Laurelton Hall’s visiting artists evoke the place in its heyday. “We tried for enough context so the galleries help interpret the material but aren’t period rooms,” said the Morse’s director, Laurence J. Ruggiero, who explained how Winter Park ended up with the world’s most comprehensive collection of Tiffany works.

The museum is named for Charles Hosmer Morse (1833-1921), a Chicago industrialist who first spent winters here in the 1880s. Morse’s granddaughter Jeannette Genius and her husband, Hugh McKean, were both talented painters who had attended nearby Rollins College. In 1930, McKean won a fellowship to stay at Laurelton Hall with Tiffany and then returned to Rollins to teach art, later becoming the college’s president. In 1942, Genius (who was a professional interior designer) had founded the Morse Gallery of Art on the Rollins campus and made McKean its director. The couple, who married in 1945, had the vision and means to collect Tiffany when he was very much out of style. In 1955, Genius curated the first museum exhibition devoted solely to Tiffany, but that was just the beginning.

Recalling their 1957 visit to the ruins of Laurelton Hall, McKean said his wife vowed to “buy everything that’s left and try to save it.” And so they did. But their gallery wasn’t large enough to display all the treasures, so Genius designed and opened a Winter Park restaurant, La Belle Verriere, festooned with her Tiffany glass. It operated from 1976 to 1990. In 1978, the McKeans gave Laurelton Hall’s monumental garden loggia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it’s now part of the courtyard of the American Wing.

The Morse Museum opened at its current location in 1995, displaying Tiffany’s creations as well as work by John La Farge, Daniel Chester French, John Singer Sargent and Frank Lloyd Wright plus Arts and Crafts furniture and pottery. A 1999 addition houses the magnificent Byzantine-Romanesque interior of the chapel Tiffany created for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Thanks to the McKeans’ well-endowed estate, the Morse does not take public funds, and even in this time of museum retrenchment it was able to complete the Laurelton Hall galleries.

Today the center of the Morse is Laurelton Hall’s 32-by-18-foot Daffodil Terrace. Originally attached to the south side of the house, it now looks out at the museum’s garden courtyard through walls of glass. Its triple-bayed pergola rests on eight marble columns 11½-feet high, each crowned with a capital of glass daffodils. When it was in Cold Spring Harbor, a pear tree grew from the terrace level and up through the opening in the middle of the pergola. At the sides of the opening are small panes of opaque blue glass, joined so as to resemble a trellis. Each pane is embedded with green glass in the shapes of leaves and stems. The flanking bays have Moorish-style ceilings of coffered tiles, painted to resemble wood. Ms. Thalheimer, the curator, explained that the cedar planks (stenciled with rectangles and six-point stars) surrounding the tiles were probably painted by Jane Peterson, who spent several months with Tiffany painting views of his house and gardens.

The Daffodil Terrace is an amazing structure, its tiles and glass seeming to shimmer and change with each step taken under it. When it was finally brought out of storage in preparation for a 2006-07 exhibition at the Metropolitan, it took two years to clean, restore and assemble its 600 parts. Mr. Ruggiero told me of visiting the New York exhibition with the Morse’s trustees: “When we’re all standing there looking at this magnificent terrace, we can’t just put it back in the box.”

Mr. Ferguson is writing “Ladies of the House: The Rossetter Sisters of Florida,” to be published by the Florida Historical Society.