Two longtime friends and colleagues in their passion for American decorative arts discuss a major acquisition to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Met’s American Wing.
In late 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the acquisition of a monumental three-part window made by Tiffany Studios for a private client in 1912. Called Garden Landscape, the dazzling window—now installed in the museum’s Engelhard Court after careful cleaning—employs Tiffany’s trademark colored, textured, and opalescent glass in striking new combinations, while also providing an occasion for exploring the firm’s assembly-line creativity, which began with the idea of the client, traveled to the paintbrush of the window’s designer Agnes Northrop, to the sharp glass-picking eyes of the Tiffany Girls, and finally received the imprimatur of Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. To fill us in, ANTIQUES guest editor Thomas Jayne speaks with Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Met.
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Thomas Jayne: Why did you acquire this window?
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen: Thomas, I have known of this window for over twenty years, and I have dreamt of it coming to the Met for that long. This is a dream come true. The window is, in my view, one of Tiffany Studios’ greatest achievements. It is monumental in scale, majestic in appearance, and an extraordinary melding of art, science, and craftsmanship. It is an illusionistic depiction of a garden landscape that is first and foremost a work of great beauty, but at the same time has many important stories to tell.
TJ: Can you tell us more about how the window was made?
ACF: The making of the window was incredibly complex. It started with a small-scale watercolor rendering that laid out the subject, its composition, the coloration, etcetera. The Met actually has the original design drawing for the central panel, signed by the designer Agnes Northrop, in its original Tiffany Studios mat—clearly a presentation drawing to be shown to the prospective client. From that small and delicate watercolor sketch, the design was then blown up into a full-scale hand-drawn cartoon, on which the lead lines were delineated. That cartoon was then cut apart with double-bladed shears or a knife, and the templates for individual panes of glass were adhered to a panel of plate glass positioned in front of a window in the studio. Tiffany’s highly skilled craftsmen, largely women, would then select from a wide range of glass samples specially made in Tiffany’s Corona furnaces, whose coloration and texture would create depth, volume, and pictorial effects for the blossoms, leaves, and landscape elements in the finished window. This required a sensitive artistic eye, and Northrop was likely involved in this process as well. The workers would cut the glass to match the often highly complex templates—there are literally thousands of individual pieces of glass in this window—and then attach them to the plate glass panel. Little by little they would put together the window as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle. Once the glass was selected and cut, and its edges covered in copper foil, it was turned over to Tiffany’s glaziers (men), who would carefully apply the lead solder to the front and back of the window, to hold all the individual pieces together.
TJ: Why is the involvement of women in the window’s creation so important?
ACF: I feel that the role of women in the art of Louis Tiffany has been undervalued and overshadowed by the considerable fame of the name Tiffany. The New-York Historical Society has made great strides in drawing attention to the important role of Clara Driscoll, a designer of many of Tiffany’s floral lampshades and manager of the so-called “Tiffany Girls,” the women who were selecting and cutting the glass. But there were so many more women who played significant roles in many different mediums—enamelwork, pottery, textiles, jewelry, and, of course, windows. Agnes Northrop worked as a window designer at Tiffany Studios for her entire career, beginning in the late 1880s and continuing until the studios closed in 1932. Her special talent was in the design of floral, garden, and landscape windows, arguably the most important contributions to the stained-glass form in the history of the medium.
TJ: How has your opinion of Tiffany changed? I know that when you and I were at the start of our careers Tiffany was considered bad taste.
ACF: I may have admitted to you before that when I first started looking at Tiffany glass during a summer internship in graduate school, I didn’t particularly like it. Nor did I know much about it, having been steeped, both personally and at Winterthur, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, when I was given the opportunity to handle the Tiffany blown glass at the Met—an incredibly important collection—I developed a great appreciation for it, for the remarkable colors and iridescent effects in the glass itself, as well as the craftsmanship. I have been fortunate at the Met to work with one of the foremost collections of the work of Louis Tiffany in virtually every medium—and he embraced virtually all mediums! And whether it was his blown glass, his enamels, furniture, jewelry, lighting, or pottery, I was continually amazed at the artistry, the ingenuity, the experimentation—pushing each material to new and unexplored heights. And his flair for representing and interpreting nature and its myriad forms has kept me continually in awe. Perhaps more recently, I have come to admire Tiffany’s ability to direct the operations of a large studio enterprise, fostering artistic excellence and collaboration among his business’s many divisions.
TJ: What has surprised you most about this window?
ACF: When I first saw the window—it is large, in three parts, and each part is made up of three lights—I was amazed. But when the panels came to the Met, and I had the opportunity to examine each individually, one at a time, with our stained-glass conservator Drew Anderson, I marveled at their extraordinary complexity. The glass that was used in the window is nothing short of remarkable—much of it highly experimental. There is glass that I have literally never seen in a stained-glass window. And there were other unusual effects—the use of textured glass in novel ways, glass embedded with murrhines (sliced millefiori canes), the use of acid-etching on flashed glass for some of the blossoms, and the unusual application of enamel to achieve the spiky pine needles, for example. It is clear that some of the glass and glass effects were created specifically for this window.
TJ: Was the patron pleased—was there give and take in the design?
ACF: I wish we knew more about this—there is really no documentation to give us any indication of the reception that the commission received from its patron, Sarah Cochran, a progressive woman—a business-woman in the coke and coal industry, a philanthropist, and suffragist. One period newspaper article suggests that the window was based on the gardens at her estate, Linden Hall, in Dawson, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. However, the window was finished well before the house and the gardens were completed. Having said that, I think it is safe to say that given Cochran’s interest in gardens, she may have requested such a design from Tiffany Studios. But it is also quite possible that that was not the case, because I recently learned of a design drawing in the same scale as the Northrop one for the central panel of our window, drawn by a local Pittsburgh studio, Rudy Brothers, as a presentation to Cochran, but in a completely different mode—highly decorative Renaissance revival—which raises some interesting questions: for example, was there a competition for the design?
TJ: Why is it important to have the windows in the Engelhard Court?
ACF: First of all, the window seems almost to have been made for the space where it’s installed, behind the four-column loggia from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s extraordinary country estate on Long Island. The panels seem almost to have been designed to fit between the columns, as if one were looking at a garden view at Tiffany’s home. But this window is not just for the American Wing—although its installation is a wonderful marker of the Wing’s one hundredth anniversary—it is for the museum’s larger public, for people from all over and from every walk of life. The Charles Engelhard Court in the American Wing is truly a spectacular light-filled space that is, of course, a gallery of sorts for American sculpture, stained glass, and architectural elements; but it is also a gathering space, a space where our visitors can sit and be contemplative, and I feel that the Garden Landscape window will provide a sense of beauty and awe. Visitors can immerse themselves in the illusionistic garden in glass with its filtered, colored light, and hopefully feel a sense of wonder and peace, and the healing power of nature giving hope and respite in our ever-more challenging world. We have installed the window where it will transform the overall court, but where it will also create its own dedicated space, almost chapel-like.
