Saturday Art: The Making Of A Tiffany Lamp

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Can you guess something very unusual about this lamp? No, it is not its value, though each individual lamp costs anywhere between  10 crores to 30 crores rupees. Neither does it have any intrinsic value in terms of precious stones or jewels.

The answer is that this is a ‘Tiffany’ lamp and these are all designed and made by ladies. By a quirk of Nature there are some ladies who have four colour receptors instead of three.  Normal humans are “trichromats”, comprising 99% of population, who can only truly see three colors - red, green and blue. All of the other colors are seen as approximations to red, green and blue. The ladies Louis Comfort Tiffany hired were “tetrachromats”, having a fourth receptor, a type of cone featuring a photopigment that allows perception of more colors that aren’t on the typically visible spectrum. While trichromats can see about 1 million colours,  tetrachromats may be able to see an incredible 100 million colours! By the way, only ladies have this genetic quirk, which endows them with the fourth receptor. Your wife could be one of them! You could find this out when she takes an endless time to decide a particular colour shade of a saree, when to your eyes they look the same!

Coming back to Tiffany, he  actually made the stained glass himself.  In doing so he actually invented several new types of glass. Originally the glass was for his jewelry, church windows, and mausoleum windows.  Apparently one day he looked around and thought “what can I do with all this pieces of stained glass?” That’s how the lamps were born. He may have known about the theory of tetrachromacy, and knew  ladies almost always possess far greater colour acuity than men. He was inflexible and was top of the best of the best designers and thus hired only ladies to use those pieces of stained glass for designing the lamps.

If you ever see an original Tiffany stained glass lamp, you'll understand. Everything is perfect! The designs, the colours, well there's nothing in the world like it. You'd understand the point about colour selection - green leaves for a tree? Oh, I'm sure there were dozens, if not hundreds of choices for the ladies to get the design just right!

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