The Scintillating Gardens of Tiffany Studios

These Tiffany artifacts don’t necessarily involve breakfast. Equally brilliant, precious and a tad more colourful, they are at their best and brightest at dinner. They are also part of the New-York Historical Society’s permanent collection and light up an entire – recently renovated – floor. 

The New-York Historical Society’s extensive collection of Tiffany Studios lamps was the gift of pioneering collector Dr. Egon Neustadt (1898-1984), an Austrian immigrant an orthodontist. Along with his wife, Hildegard Steininger (1911-1961), Neustadt began buying Tiffany lamps at a time when Americans scorned them as passé. Shortly after their marriage in 1935, the couple, looking for affordable furnishings for their Queens home, found a ”strange, old-fashioned” Daffodil lamp in  Greenwich Village antique shop and purchased it for $12.50. That modest discovery sparked a decades-long quest in which the Neustadts amassed more than 200 Tiffany lamps, perhaps the largest and most encyclopedic collection in the world. 

September 23rd, 2017