Louis Comfort Tiffany, Tiffany Studios, Detail of St. Michael the Archangel, Triumph in Heaven, stained glass, late 1890s. (Courtesy St. Michael’s Church, NY, NY)
Last week I wrote about the stained-glass program at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Manhattan. In the early 1890s, the polymath artist John La Farge (1835–1919) designed the 15 windows, some rondels with a diameter of six feet and some 15-foot-high narrow verticals. For iridescence and translucence, the Judson windows are hard to match.
This week I’ll focus on the stained glass at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on 99th Street on the Upper West Side. They’re the work of La Farge’s friend, then hate figure Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933). New York has great Gilded Age church buildings, and St. Michael’s and the Judson Church, both Romanesque Revival and both built in 1891, are two of the very best.
Tiffany’s project took longer. The Judson windows were mostly done in the 1890s while Tiffany and his big studio worked on the seven enormous lancet windows above the church altar starting in 1895 and finishing around 1920. Tiffany Studios designed the altar, altar rail, pulpit, dome over the apse, and impressive mosaics as well as gilded columns, but the nave was left plain. The building was High Victorian and High Church, which means high-priced, and I suspect the place either ran out of money to do what Tiffany wanted there, or it ran into the 1920s-era Georgian Revival taste for a lighter palette and more subtle decoration.
Edward Judson, the Baptist minister who hired Sanford White to design the Judson Church, later got into trouble with John D. Rockefeller Jr. (he and Rockefeller Sr. were the church’s biggest funders), for spending too much on glitz. The Judson Church was, after all, Baptist and served a needy immigrant neighborhood. That said, the Judson Church is austere compared with St. Michael’s, just as La Farge’s aesthetic was restrained while Tiffany’s could be very flashy.
Looking at the altar, one sees that the main affair is St. Michael’s Victory in Heaven, and both artist and archangel certainly knew how to throw a party, but it’s a party where one of the guests doesn’t make it out alive. In the Book of Revelation, St. Michael’s leads God’s army in the final battle against Satan, kills him, and tosses him to Earth, where he tempts and torments us as the Devil. That’s the Methodist take, and since I’m a Methodist, that’s the horse I’ll pick. I know Jews see Michael through the Book of Daniel.
Louis Comfort Tiffany, Tiffany Studios, Details of Angels, St. Michael the Archangel, Triumph in Heaven, stained glass, late 1890s. (Courtesy St. Michael’s Church, NY, NY)
So, we have action. We have angels, and lots of them, from big angels with movie-star faces to little angel heads. We’ve got not just four archangels, which is what we Methodists allow, but seven. I’ve visited this church many times over the years, since the windows are splendid and the white rusticated stone of the church exterior is very appealing. It’s unusual in that, for a Romanesque Revival church, it’s not dark stone. The church was part of the development boom that created the Upper West Side in a short space of time from a quiet, nearly rural neighborhood. The aesthetic is brownstone, so St. Michael’s is a distinctive, inviting presence.
The windows are cinematic and have the sweep of a Cecil B. DeMille movie but not points of concentration, which allow reflection. Their message is in the abundance, not the particular. The viewer isn’t engaged with any deity or story but in conversation with an overall effect, which never becomes babble since the scenes are beautifully organized. That’s Tiffany. He made mass-produced goods, very high quality but with far more sparkle. He was pushing a medium that was new in terms of technology and capacity, and he took the best of both and went with it.
This is not to suggest these windows aren’t great works of art. They’re fantastic. By the late 1890s, Tiffany had made so many advances in glass technology that sections such as St. Michael’s wings seem like fireworks. Clouds have sweeps of blue, yellow, and green mixed with basic white to look like dense, swirling clouds. Close-ups show the chromatic range and richness that Tiffany was able to achieve. The faces of the angels and saints have a movie-star glow. I think “CinemaScope” and am so dazzled, I really don’t want to pray.
There’s a business story, and I like to write about the business part of art. Here’s the hate story between La Farge and Tiffany, and what Tiffany did that La Farge didn’t. What did La Farge invent? La Farge patented opalescent glass flat enough to be used for windows. Opalescent glass is a nearly opaque glass with rich colors that appear to mix. It both reflects and refracts light. It isn’t about transparency but translucence. Until La Farge’s invention, opalescent glass was produced at pressed-glass factories for tableware like goblets and pitchers.
La Farge wasn’t thinking of a business. He wasn’t a businessman. He was an artist and thinking about an idea. He was still doing custom work for the early church-building rich in Boston and New York, and though he owned two patents, his technical understanding was governed by glaziers who didn’t know much about the patent world. He met with his young friend Tiffany in early 1880. Tiffany was a talented painter and, like La Farge, from a rich New York family. He was also interested in stained-glass windows. Though Holly Golightly and “Moon River” were decades away, his father’s jewelry store was already well known.
La Farge already owned a patent for making flatter opalescent glass. He told Tiffany that, to achieve maximum translucence, glass mosaic plates needed to be placed in layers, with tiny air spaces between them to manipulate light. Tiffany soon patented what La Farge had told him. Glass that looked like an oil painting, with mixed colors and glazes, needed a precise placement, in layered sheets. La Farge owned the patent for the glass, but Tiffany owned the patent for assembly.
La Farge was furious with Tiffany for the rest of his life, though the issue of intellectual property wasn’t the worst of it. La Farge wanted to form a stained-glass business with Tiffany, but Tiffany wasn’t interested. First of all, Tiffany wasn’t crazy, but La Farge was. He died in an insane asylum, which is one bit of evidence, but he spent a year traveling with Henry Adams through the South Seas in 1891, which is a sure sign of crazy. Tiffany moved on with a business model based on mass production.
La Farge felt that Tiffany had stolen his ideas, but he never got himself organized to fight since La Farge moved from project to project, from medium to medium, as a natural eccentric and single shooter. Tiffany created a business empire. He owned many patents, owned factories, decorated the White House, and died both rich and famous, though by 1933 the sinuous, languid Art Nouveau style as well as stained glass that looked like an Old Master painting were out. Art Deco was in.
Tiffany is probably best known for the stained-glass lamps. The lamps aren’t great. They weep, they blossom, and they’ve got drooping bugs. A few years ago, scholars learned that they were designed by women, a group names the Driscoll Girls, and that gave them cachet. The lamps were out of style until the 1980s. In the Teens and 1920s, rip-offs were ubiquitous. I’ve seen hundreds of the real things and find them hard to like. Tiffany, as an artist, is best seen as an entrepreneur who made Art Nouveau and Aesthetic styles, both European, into the ruling art taste among America’s rich, and, before long, that trickled to everyone. He ruled quality control at Tiffany Studios and created America’s first high-end design empire.
St. Michael’s did an unusually good and smart renovation about 20 years ago. Tiffany and his company, as I said, worked on the church for years. Aside from gilding the columns, the nave wasn’t finished in Tiffany’s characteristic palette of saturated colors and patterns stenciled on the walls. When the church renovated the interior, the project’s design implemented Tiffany’s vision. It didn’t renovate the church to look as it originally did but to give the place a unified aesthetic look Tiffany wanted. The interior now has the High Victorian feel we want. I’ve never been there for a service, but I’m sure it’s a spectacle, and that’s what it should be. It’s an Episcopal church.
