The Nassau County Museum of Art's summer-long Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition is heading into its last stretch. Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist of the Gilded Age, which opened at the Roslyn Harbor museum on July 25, closes on Sunday, November 8, leaving three more weekends to see it.

The show is built on the museum's own holdings. It brings together more than 130 of Tiffany's oil and watercolor paintings from the museum's collection, a side of the artist far less known than the glass his name usually calls to mind.

The painter behind the lamps

Tiffany, who lived from 1848 to 1933, was the son of the founder of the Tiffany and Company jewelry house and became one of the most recognized American decorative artists of the Gilded Age, known for stained glass windows, iridescent Favrile glass and the leaded glass lamps that still carry his name. He was also a Long Islander by choice: he built Laurelton Hall, his estate in Laurel Hollow on the North Shore, a few miles east of the museum that now holds this show.

The exhibition pairs the paintings with Tiffany's lamps, metalwork and ceramics, along with loaned stained glass windows, furniture and decorative arts, plus works by his contemporaries. Hung together, the paintings and objects show the same approach to light, color and nature running through everything the studio touched, whether the medium was watercolor or glass.

The show was curated by chief curator Franklin Hill Perrell with co-curator Alex C. Maccaro, and was made possible by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, the Long Island foundation that funds projects on the region's history.

A Gilded Age show in a Gilded Age setting

The setting does some of the work. The museum occupies a Gold Coast mansion in Roslyn Harbor, so the paintings and glass hang in rooms built in the same era the show covers. The museum is also using the exhibition as the backdrop for its annual gala on Saturday, November 7, the night before the show closes.

After the Tiffany show comes down, the museum's next exhibition, NYC Glam: The 60s to 80s, opens November 21.

If you go

The Nassau County Museum of Art is at One Museum Drive in Roslyn Harbor. The mansion is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with the last tickets sold at 4:15 p.m., and is closed Mondays. Admission is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors 65 and over, and $5 for students with ID and children under 12; children under 4 and museum members are free. Parking is free, and the arboretum and sculpture garden on the grounds are open daily from 9 a.m. to dusk at no charge.

That leaves the weekends of October 24, October 31 and November 7 to catch the show, plus the Tuesday-through-Friday afternoons in between.

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