3-part Garden landscape window for Linden Hall

This three-part Tiffany window–majestic in scale, magnificent in concept and execution, and highly illusionistic–depicts a lush garden landscape. Conceived, commissioned, and crafted by women, it highlights the important, and often unrecognized, role played by women in the art of Louis C. Tiffany. It was designed by Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s premier window designers, and the attribution is based on a signed design drawing in the Met’s collection (67.654.229). Northrop worked for Tiffany’s firm for virtually her entire career as an independent woman with a studio of her own.

Sarah Cochran, a successful Pittsburgh businesswoman, philanthropist, and suffragist, commissioned the window from Tiffany Studios for Linden Hall, the large estate she built in Dawson, Pennsylvania, in 1912. She personally requested the subject, suggestive of her own gardens. The window offers a long vista through tall pines flanking a central fountain amidst a profusion of flowers—pink and blue hydrangeas, poppies, and nasturtiums. The two side panels depict, on the left, foxglove and peonies, and, on the right, hollyhocks, exquisitely rendered in glass. These were subjects much favored by Northrop and American Impressionist painters, and aligned with the comforting nostalgia of the “old-fashioned garden.”

Northrop achieved the extraordinarily illusionistic quality by exploiting the varied textures, lush colors, and light effects made possible only with Tiffany’s special Favrile glass made at his Corona (Queens) furnaces. It exhibits some especially innovative and unusual techniques in stained glass. The careful selection of the ingenious glass and the cutting into often impossible shapes of literally thousands of pieces of glass was done by Tiffany’s skilled artisans, who were also largely women. Merging imagery with chromatic light, the window presents a beautiful garden view, perennially at its peak.