Short answer: Tiffany lamps took off around 1900 and stayed fashionable into the 1910s and early 1920s. They then fell out of favor, returned in the late 1950s, and are back in homes today.
The longer answer is more interesting. The lamp most people picture was made for a specific moment, and a woman most people have never heard of did much of the designing. Here's the timeline, plus what it means if you're thinking of putting one in your own home.
The first wave: 1898 to the 1920s
Louis Comfort Tiffany turned to lamps in 1898, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had already spent years making leaded-glass windows, so a lampshade was a natural next step: the same colored glass, on a smaller scale, lit from within.
Each shade was assembled from individual pieces of glass chosen for color and density, so no two looked quite alike, even when they followed the same pattern. It's still a good test for any stained glass lamp. Look at how the pieces vary, not just at the design.
The lamps sold especially well to wealthy New Yorkers, and the studio's other glasswork kept the name in the news. A Tiffany lamp was a status object before it was a decorating idea.
The woman behind the best-known designs
The name on the lamp was Tiffany's, but much of the thinking belonged to Clara Driscoll. She ran a department of around 35 women glass cutters, known as the Tiffany Girls. The New-York Historical Society notes that it was probably her idea to make the leaded lampshades that made the studio famous, and that she designed the Dragonfly lamp. A version of it won a prize at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.
Her role was largely forgotten for a century. It came back into view with a 2007 exhibition in New York. If you've ever wondered why the nature motifs, the dragonflies, wisteria and water lilies, feel so observed rather than decorative, now you know who was looking.
Why the fashion faded
Taste moved on. After the First World War, cleaner geometric Art Deco and then modernism made colored glass and organic motifs feel heavy and old-fashioned. Tiffany Studios went bankrupt in 1932, and Louis Comfort Tiffany died the following year.
The lamps hadn't changed. The rooms around them had. A shade built for a dark, richly layered Victorian interior looked out of place against bare white walls.
The comeback
Interest returned in the late 1950s, when museums and collectors began to take Tiffany seriously again, and it grew with the wider Art Nouveau revival of the 1960s. Today original Tiffany Studios lamps are collector's pieces.
What most of us can actually buy is Tiffany-style: lamps that use the same leaded or copper-foil glass technique and the same spirit, without the Tiffany Studios name. That's a perfectly good thing to want, as long as the seller says so plainly. We explain the difference in why they're called Tiffany lamps.
Using one in a modern room
The old rooms were crowded. A stained glass lamp works best in the opposite setting. Let the shade be the loudest thing on the surface, and keep the rest quiet: a plain wall, a wooden console, one or two objects at most.
A few practical points help:
- Choose a warm bulb. 2700 K to 3000 K lets amber, red and green glass glow instead of turning gray.
- Mind the size. Many Tiffany-style table lamps are small, which suits a nightstand, a shelf or a narrow console.
- Look at the glass. A varied, slightly uneven surface reads as richer than perfectly uniform color, switched on or off.
Our own Dragonfly Lotus lamp is Tiffany-style, not a Tiffany Studios piece. It's 14.4 inches tall, with a resin base in a bronze-tone finish.
So, when were Tiffany lamps popular? Around 1900, again from the late 1950s, and now. Whether they suit a modern room is a fair question, and we answer it in are Tiffany lamps in style. The style survives every change in taste because a lit shade of colored glass is hard to improve on.
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