The Reaper

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Tiffany frequently painted genre scenes in the countryside around his father’s estate near Irvington, New York. These works recall scenes of rural life by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson. At this time the art writer S. G. W. Benjamin noted that Tiffany was “now giving preference to American subjects. . . . He is essentially a colorist, to whom the radiant tints of the iris seem like harmoniously chorded strains of music.” It was only in the early 1890s that Tiffany’s productivity as a painter began to decline, and that he began to almost completely focus on the decorative arts for which he became renowned.