Design drawing of clustered columns in interior

This drawing is a detailed architectural design for a larger interior design scheme. Another drawing in the Museum’s collection was recently identified as a rendering for the interior of the First Presbyterian Church in Poughkeepsie, New York (now the Redeemed Christian Fellowship Church of God of Prophecy). The clustered columns seen in this drawing supported mosaic spandrels and were repeated four times around the central space. The decoration is documented to Tiffany through period newspapers that include glowing descriptions of the interior, noting in particular the mosaic-decorated columns. The columns bring to mind the mosaic-decorated columns that Tiffany designed and made for the firm’s impressive installation of a complete chapel at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893. The drawing of the mosaic columns also relates to the Museum’s own Tiffany mosaic column with a gilded capital on view in the Charles Engelhard Court. The original Tiffany-designed interiors of the church are largely destroyed, and the drawing is important evidence to document what the original interiors were like when they were enthusiastically praised by the New York Times in the spring of 1908.