View of Oyster Bay, 1908
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933)
American
Tiffany Studios (1902–1938)
Leaded Favrile-glass window from the William C. Skinner House, New York City
72 3/4 x 66 1/2 in. (184.8 x 168.9 cm)
Lent to The Metropolitan Museum of Art by The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida, in memory of Charles Hosmer Morse (L.1978.19)

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This idealized landscape framed by wistaria vines was executed in 1908 for William C. Skinner's New York home at 36 East Thirty-eighth Street, which he shared with his unmarried sister Belle. According to an entry in Skinner's diary, the wistaria window was installed in the house along with decorations for the foyer and stairway, the entire work costing $3,000. Although often called View of Oyster Bay because its pale, dawn-colored water scene has been thought to recall the shoreline around Tiffany's summer home, Laurelton Hall, the window more likely derives its theme from the flowering vines surrounding Skinner's family house, Wistariahurst, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, near the silk mills that built the Skinners' fortune.


 


 
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