Displaying items by tag: windows

The colorful, stained-glass effect decor items produced by Tiffany Studios represent some of the most beautiful and quintessential specimens of pre-war design such as the Oriental Poppy lamp, which sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York this past May. As a painter, Louis Comfort Tiffany was fascinated with the interplay of light and color, and using opalescent glass as his canvas, created masterful renderings of nature — such as flowers or landscape scenes — and decorative geometric patterns in lampshades and leaded-glass windows that popped with color and texture.

Nearly a hundred examples of iconic Tiffany Studios works are forming the centerpiece of Sotheby’s sale of Tiffany and Prewar Design: The Warshawsky Collection in New York on May 19.

Led by the "Elaborate Peony" Lamp, circa 1910 (est. $600,000-$900,000), the variety of colorful glass works in mostly floral motifs is emblematic of the collection of noted Chicago businessman Roy Warshawsky and his wife Sarita, who assembled the works from the 1960s through the 1990s. There are also leaded glass lighting and windows, favrile glass, enamels, pottery, and bronze pieces produced by the firm founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

In 1964, Cincinnati’s Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem was razed for the construction of a highway. The spiritual home to followers of the 18th-century Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, the church was built in 1902, at which time it received the gift of seven stained-glass windows produced by Tiffany Studios, the pre-eminent American producer of stained and art glass, under the direction of the firm’s founder and head, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). Unlike many Tiffany windows that perished when their buildings faced the wrecking ball, these were preserved. For decades they sat in crates, hidden away in basements and garages of parishioners, and eventually a barn in Pennsylvania. Only when the barn began to leak in 2001 did a newly appointed minister open the crates. To her astonishment, that which was lost was found again—and even covered with decades of grime, the unique Tiffany beauty of all seven windows, each emblazoned with a life-size stained-glass angel, made a powerful impression.

The National Gallery of Art unveils a show of artwork from one of America's best known painters, Andrew Wyeth, on May 4th that has a decidedly new twist. The exhibit focuses on Wyeth’s fascination with windows – an apparently unnoticed feature of his work that came to light when a curator began wondering about a Wyeth acquisition that came to the gallery in 2009.

The evocative painting of a window with gently billowing curtains and a landscape through the window, “Wind from the Sea,” made curator Nancy K. Anderson start looking for more. “Are we making this up?” she asked, only to have Wyeth family members confirm his interest in windows.