Tiffany Windows Installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

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Tiffany Windows Installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Left to right: Dawn in the Woods in Springtime and Sunset in Autumn Woods, in situ, All Souls Universalist Church, Brooklyn

Two 1905 Tiffany windows, each nearly twelve feet high, depicting woodland landscapes in brilliantly colored glass were installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in January, 1999. On long-term loan from the All Souls Universalist Church in Brooklyn, the two windows are from the workshops of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), who revolutionized the art of stained-glass windows in late nineteenth-century America.

The windows, Dawn in the Woods in Springtime and Sunset in Autumn Woods, can be viewed as both natural landscapes and allegories of life and the passage of time. Originally made in Corona, NY in 1905 for the Universalist Church of Our Father at Classon and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn, the windows were produced during a surge of church construction in the early twentieth century when the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany was in great demand. They were purchased by the All Souls Universalist Church and installed in its sanctuary in 1945. As the congregation of All Souls shrank in the 1990s, the church building was put up for sale and the Tiffany windows were generously lent to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Louis Comfort Tiffany led America in the art of stained glass during the late nineteenth century. His brilliant range of colors was the result of endless experiments with adding metal oxides to the basic glass and manipulating and layering the finished product to produce just the right effect in a completed window. Tiffany commented, "My chemists and furnace men insisted for a long time that it was impossible to achieve the effect we were striving for. New-style firing ovens had to be built and new methods devised for annealing glass. . . . It took me thirty years to learn the art." But the quest paid off and Tiffany windows became world-renowned.

The conservation and installation of these windows have been made possible by the Stockman Family Foundation, the Vinmont Foundation, and the Clemente Foundation. The windows are the highlight of the Museum's stained-glass installation and join windows by John LaFarge (circa 1906-7), Lamb Studios (circa 1899), and Walter Cole Brigham (circa 1912).

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