Daniel Cottier: Visionary Artist/Designer/Dealer
I am quite fortunate that Daniel Cottier is now a recurring artist in my life. I am not done diving into his amazing career.
I've long admired the talents of Scottish artist/craftsman/interior decorator/art dealer Daniel Cottier (1838-91), gazing longingly at two ceramic panels exhibited at the Winter Antiques Show at New York's Park Avenue Armory several years back. Cottier not only worked as a stained glass artist in Scotland, he also designed ceramics and furniture and opened his own highly successful international interior design company, Cottier & Company, which had branches in several cities, including New York, Glasgow, and Sydney, but he also sold fine art by contemporary American and European artists, including the symbolist painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. He is credited with introducing the Aesthetic Movement to the United States and impacting the decorative career of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Cottier decorated interiors of churches and private homes in the United States, notably in New York City and Newport. If you are patient, persistent, and intrepid, rarities turn up, and in the space of less than two years, I was able to not only purchase this beautiful Japanesque/Aesthetic Movement stained glass panel, almost certainly by Cottier, but also acquired a ceramic charger stamped Cottier & Co. In the composition and color, the window closely resembles a set of panels made 1877-78, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, removed from the William Watts Sherman House in Newport. My panel is now being fitted into a light box, to better display the jewel-like colors and delicate painting.