Bing popped into my head for the letter B.  Not Bing Crosby.  Not bing the search engine.  Not bada bing.  Siegfried Bing, who later called himself Samuel Bing, art collector, with a vision of style with sinuous curves, swirls and champion of “L’Art Nouveau” which delighted in decoration.

He was a fan of Louis Tiffany, so that makes him even more cool.  His description of Tiffany’s art glass, which was truly a work of art, is fabulous:

Here what he wanted is the discreet calm of semi-opaque tones in which, embedded within the glass itself, he simulated fine veins, filaments, and trails of color similar to the delicate nuances in the skin of fruit, the petal of a flower, the veins of an autumn leaf….Thus he created certain types of opaque and matt vases, whose excellence—the result of long effort—lay in their incomparable smoothness of surface, giving the sensation of a silky, delicate skin.

Bing had a vision, and although he wasn’t an artist in the strictest sense of the word, his ability to create a collection in his gallery of artists that expressed his vision is breathtaking.

Here’s a photo by Stratoz of a dragonfly glass vase by Emile Galle–an Art Nouveau Artist.

Related:

Over at Stratoz

B is for Blue Green