Lecture: The Tiffany Windows at St. Paul’s Church

Join us for a presentation with curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen of Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a lecture titled: The Tiffany Windows at St. Paul’s Church in Context: The Garden and Landscape Windows of Agnes Northrop.

This lecture will bring to light the work of Agnes Northrop, the only independent woman designer Tiffany employed. She designed some of the most memorable stained-glass windows to emerge from his studios, including likely those at St. Paul’s Church in Nantucket. In spite of her prominent role at the time, few windows have been attributed to her until recently, and her significance has been long overshadowed by Tiffany himself and by other women in his employ.  Nonetheless, Northrop devoted her entire lifetime career at the Tiffany Studios and was responsible for such prestigious commissions as those for Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould.  Northrop, under Tiffany’s aegis, introduced wholly new subjects to stained glass windows—landscapes and gardens—manifestations of artistic, religious, and environmental movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the talk, attendees will be invited to walk over to St. Paul’s Church to view the windows.

The Tiffany windows are the highlight of St. Paul’s Church’s stained glass windows. They date from the construction of the church in 1902, and are true, classic Art Nouveau windows, that are probably priceless today. The windows are beautiful and unusual. They depict landscapes and flowers, have no human images, and tell no “story.” The plant life depicted could be native to Nantucket.