December 1, 2008
Sentinel exclusive
A home for Tiffany's daffodils
Autumn panel from Four Seasons window. (MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART)
The famed Daffodil Terrace from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Long Island estate will be displayed in a new wing of the Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park.
The museum, home to the world's most extensive collection of Tiffany works, plans to build the 10,000-foot addition to showcase some of his most spectacular pieces.
For decades, the Morse kept in storage most of the Daffodil Terrace and many other pieces from Tiffany's Laurelton Hall, destroyed by fire in 1957.
Director Laurence Ruggiero said the museum is prepared to spend $6 million to $7 million on the project, to be designed by Winter Park architects Rogers, Lovelock and Fritz. The Morse's board of trustees has approved tentative plans, and the addition could open by early 2010.
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The new wing will stretch along Canton Avenue behind the present 25,000-square-foot building. The expanded museum will realize the dream of the Morse's late founders, Hugh and Jeannette Genius McKean.
"From Hugh and Jeannette's point of view, it's a major part of their legacy," Ruggiero said.
The McKeans -- he an art professor who became president of Rollins College, she a painter and heir to the fortune of her grandfather, industrialist Charles Hosmer Morse -- rescued many of Tiffany's treasures after Laurelton Hall burned. Hugh McKean had been a devotee of Tiffany's works since a stint as a young art student at Laurelton Hall in 1930, and he and his wife rushed to rescue architectural elements, furniture and windows from the ruined building.
Those works became the cornerstone of the Tiffany collection at the Morse.
In 2006 New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art launched an exhibition of Tiffany works from the Morse that required several pieces to be restored, and the Morse began to look for a permanent public place for them.
The Met exhibition drew the eyes of art experts and more than 325,000 museum visitors to the lost world of Tiffany's Laurelton Hall, Ruggiero said, and persuaded the Morse to take steps to put more of its Laurelton works on display.
That's significant, said Tiffany specialist Elizabeth Johnston DeRosa, because Tiffany had assembled at his estate much of the artwork he considered his best.
"He turned his summer home into a kind of museum," said DeRosa, who teaches at New York's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
"To understand Tiffany's attitudes toward art and toward his own work, it's tremendously important" to be able to see the Laurelton Hall pieces, she said.
Chief among them is the terrace, a covered porch that connected Laurelton's dining room to its gardens. Its paneled ceiling and eight marble columns, crowned by bouquets of yellow glass daffodils, were restored for the Met's exhibition.
Plans are for the reconstructed terrace to be the focal point of the Morse's new wing -- housed in a glass room between the Morse building proper and an expanded outdoor garden courtyard, the way the terrace connected indoors to outdoors at Laurelton Hall.
One of the wing's galleries will be devoted to Laurelton's dining room, and a living-room section will feature Tiffany's "Four Seasons" window.
The aim is to put the objects in context so that visitors will get a feeling for Laurelton Hall.
"It should be a more meaningful experience than it ever was in the past," Ruggiero said.
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
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