Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
‘Conserving Tiffany’s Gilded Age Drawings’ is a 15-minute video dated October 14, 2026, and part of ‘Conservation Stories’. The film follows Paper Conservator Marina Ruiz Molina working in collaboration with Curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen on a complex treatment to save a watercolor drawing.
The drawing was made for a conservatory recently identified as belonging to a villa in Havana, Cuba, and it suffered significant damage over time.
The majority of the drawings were purchased by the Museum in 1967 despite significant damage from water, mold, dirt, and acidic papers.
From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Tiffany Studios created thousands—or perhaps tens of thousands—of design drawings encompassing the work of the studio during the height of the Gilded Age. Most of those drawings did not survive.
An in-depth study of the period’s designs presents 150 rarely seen drawings by artists who worked in Louis C. Tiffany’s studios.
