Tiffany Garden Landscape window in new home at the Met

The magnificent triple window by Louis Comfort Tiffany studio of a lush garden landscape, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 2023 has been installed in the museum’s American Wing.

The window was designed by Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s premier designers and a pioneer in the landscape style of art glass windows. Northrop and the studio’s workshop of largely female glass cutters known as the “Tiffany Girls” selected, made, cut and composed thousands of pieces of glass, utilizing innovative techniques to create the rich profusion of trees and flowers.

It was commissioned by coal queen Sarah Cochran for Linden Hall, the grand estate she had built in Dawson, Pennsylvania, in 1912. Inspired by Linden Hall’s actual garden, the landscape window depicts a beautiful walled garden full of flowers — hydrangeas, poppies, nasturtiums, foxglove, peonies, hollyhocks — with an elegant fountain in the middle ground against a backdrop of pines and mountains in the distant background.

Last month, the Met posted a fascinating and surprisingly touching video about the installation of this magical masterpiece. You get to see close-up the variety of glass types in the window. The glass conservator’s repair of one piece that had shifted provides a fascinating glimpse into how this thing was put together. The panes in Tiffany landscapes aren’t individually joined with lead came strips or copper foil like traditional stained glass windows are. There’s minimal solder and ultra-thin backing glass. Seeing the delicacy of the construction, it’s amazing that the Garden Landscape window has survived being dismantled into its component panels (nine large and nine smaller ones) and moved at least twice.

The video concludes by showcasing the majestic triple window in its new home in the Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing. There are several views of the entrance loggia with four columns Tiffany designed for his own home, Laurelton Hall, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The intricate columns with their flowered capitals and geometric mosaic architrave frame the window when viewed from the middle of the courtyard where stands a half-sized variant of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Madison Square Garden bronze statue of Diana.

* This article was originally published here