Rare and Important Six-Piece Tea and Coffee Service, commissioned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her husband Harry Paine Whitney for the marriage of their niece, Emily Frances Whitney to Allan Lindsay Briggs, circa 1910

Despite his training under Tiffany & Co.’s acclaimed Design Director Edward C. Moore, hollowware designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany is exceedingly rare. Fewer than twenty known works in silver have been attributed to him. This scarcity of Tiffany's work in silver is underscored by the fact that the liquidation sale of Tiffany Studio's stock in 1936 contained not a single piece of solid silver. The auction of 1,726 lots contained bronze, Favrile glass, stained glass, silver-plated wares, and oriental carpets (see catalogue, Products of Louis Comfort Tiffany Studios on the Premises, 46 West 23rd Street, New York, Joseph and Jacobson Auctioneers, May 18-23, 1936).
Only one other silver tea service is known to have been designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and that service was for his own personal use at Laurelton Hall, the highly publicized mansion of his own design in Oyster Bay, New York, completed in 1905. Made between 1902 and 1904, the four-piece tea service was the only silver in the 1946 auction of the contents of Laurelton Hall (see catalogue, Favrile Glass...Objects of Art, Paintings, Antiques, Decorations, Belonging to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Removed from Laurelton Hall, Parke-Bernet Galleries, September 24-28, 1946, p. 199). Three pieces of Laurelton Hall service are now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, illustrated in Leslie Greene Bowman, Virtue in Design, L.A.C.M.A., 1990, p. 124. The tea service, which originally also included a kettle on lampstand, was displayed in the dining room at Laurelton Hall, and was possibly used with a copper tray as illustrated in Robert Koch, Louis C. Tiffany, Rebel in Glass, 1964, and in Charles H. Carpenter, Jr., "The Silver of Louis Comfort Tiffany," op.cit., fig. 1, p. 392.
Both the Laurelton Hall service and the present example were likely made by Julia Munson, talented metalworker and supervisor at Tiffany Studios. The visible hammer marks and high quality chasing on both services indicate her hand. At the time the Whitney tea service was made, Louis Comfort Tiffany was vice-president and artistic director of Tiffany & Co., which likely accounts for the inclusion of Tiffany & Co. tray and salver with this service.
A silver, gold and enamel vase designed By Louis Comfort Tiffany for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition was sold in these rooms on 24 January 2020, lot 380.