Tiffany Lamp Lights Up the Auction Block With Record $4.4 Million Sale

Of the dozens of Tiffany lamps Sotheby’s offered at its Dreaming in Glass auction in New York, none came close to matching the price achieved for the Magnolia floor lamp. The object netted $4.4 million after a 10-minute bidding battle, according to the auction house, making it the most expensive leaded lamp by the decorative arts studio to sell at auction.

Manufactured around 1910, the lamp features a patinated bronze stand, capped with a 28-inch dome of colored glass depicting a crowd of magnolias. Tiffany lamps bearing magnolia motifs, among the company’s best-known designs, are exceedingly rare—it has been two decades since a pristine example has landed on the market, Sotheby’s pointed out. Its standing in design history saw the lamp tagged with a $3 million high estimate at this recent sale, a sum it handily trumped.

Tiffany Studios, Magnolia floor lamp. Photo: courtesy of Sotheby’s.

While Tiffany Studios’s floral designs are usually attributed to Clara Driscoll, evidence suggests the Magnolia lamp was crafted by Agnes Northrop, its star designer. Northrop was known to grow magnolias, for one (Louis Comfort Tiffany also bred magnolia varieties at his country home, where Northrop was a regular visitor). She was also behind some of Tiffany’s finest windows featuring magnolias, among them the Magnolia panel, which was displayed at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris.

Northrop’s Tiffany creations have found their way into institutional collections. Her Magnolia window now sits in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In 2023, her monumental Garden Landscape window (1912) was acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which already holds her design drawing for the window’s middle panel.

Agnes Northrop, Tiffany Garden Landscape Window (1912). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her Magnolia lamp, too, bears out her masterful glass work, expert Paul Doros wrote for Sotheby’s. The large flowers are captured in iridescent shades, from green-tinted white to an opalescent gold. In the background is a deep marbled blue. The entire scene’s three-dimensionality is achieved with the use of rippled and “drapery” glass—named for its effect of mimicing draped fabric—which further offer a visual rhythm and energy.

“The glass selected for this shade,” Doros noted, “has rarely been equaled in terms of color, texture, and composition.”

Famously, one such Magnolia lamp was so loved by a young Steve Jobs that it was one of the very few furnishings in his California apartment in 1982. Other Tiffany lamps, meanwhile, have been catnip for the TikTok crowd.

Louis Comfort Tiffany and Agnes Northrup, Danner Memorial Window (1913). Photo: Sotheby’s.

This latest auction continues Tiffany Studios’s hot streak on the market. In June, its Gilded-Age Goddard Memorial Window realized an estimate-shattering $4.2 million at Christie’s, but not before its Danner Memorial Window, another Northrop design, became the most expensive Tiffany window ever sold, when it achieved $12.4 million at Sotheby’s last year.

Besides the Magnolia lamp, a trove of other Tiffany treasures are hitting the block this month, including a chandelier and window at Christie’s and yet another chandelier at Bonhams.