Louis Comfort Tiffany is the best known manufacturer of art glass in America, a market he dominated by the early 20th century. In 1894, only a year after he opened his glass furnace at Corona, Long Island, Tiffany patented the technique of exposing molten glass to metal oxides and thus creating a colorful iridescent surface. Tiffany called this process favrile, after the Latin word faber (artisan), and it proved successful for creating realistic organic forms like this Art Nouveau vase. Here the glass is shaped in various ways to depict an Egyptian onion with an elongated plant-like stem and flower. [P]The last private owner of this vase was Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who helped form the modern design collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his famous home, Falling Water, in southwestern Pennsylvania.