Mural, The Dream Garden, 1916.
Tiffany Studios. Glass mosaic. Curtis Publishing Company Building (now The Curtis Center & Dream Garden);
mural in the collection of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (2001.15, partial bequest of John W. Merriam;
partial purchase with funds provided by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts;
partial gift of Bryn Mawr College, The University of the Arts, and The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Dream Garden is a resplendent 15- by 49- foot mosaic based on a landscape painting by American artist, Maxfield Parrish. It includes over a million pieces of Tiffany glass in over 260 different color tones.
The cloudless blue sky and colorful mountain range are luminous because of the shimmering qualities of Tiffany’s iridescent glass.
To create the blossoms for the flowering bushes, Tiffany’s glassmakers cut out patterned murrine from blown and flattened sheets of glass, a completely innovative technique used for mosaic.
Special sheets of rolled opalescent glass were made with streaks and spotting to cut pieces for areas like the tree bark and leafy canopies.
Gold and silver colored metal leaf was applied to the back of transparent tesserae to capture the effect of glinting sunlight on distant mountains.
Iridescent glass patterned with spots, threads, and rough textures give the impression of ornamental bushes dense with foliage and branches.
Imagine standing under the canopy of a tree and watching the shifting sunlight as leaves move in the breeze. Glass selectors captured this effect by choosing pieces from sheets of spotted and streaky glass like these.
Tiffany’s chemists experimented over a two-year period to create glass that approximated Maxfield Parrish’s signature color palette.