The Metropolitan Museum of Art has expanded its collection with a significant Tiffany stained-glass window, “Garden Landscape” (1912), crafted by the influential designer Agnes Northrop. This impressive artwork, over 20 feet in length, features a vibrant outdoor scene filled with blooming flowers and majestic trees, composed of thousands of Favrile glass pieces. Like other stained glass from its time, it shares a visual language with the Impressionist paintings of the era.
“She’s not a household name, although she should be,” commented Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, The Met’s Curator of American Decorative Arts, to Hyperallergic. The museum has owned a watercolor design pamphlet for the window’s central panel since 1967, which sparked Frelinghuysen’s interest in Northrop’s work. Born in 1857 in Flushing, Queens, Northrop spent most of her life there and began her career with Louis Comfort Tiffany’s design firm shortly after its founding in 1885, becoming one of its foremost window designers over a 50-year tenure.
Frelinghuysen describes Northrop’s passion for window design, noting how she and Tiffany revolutionized the medium in the 1890s by focusing on landscapes and gardens rather than human figures. The newly acquired window showcases an intricate array of flora, from hollyhocks in rich hues to foxglove blossoms with light-to-dark gradients, and pine needles etched for a spiky texture. The central fountain’s flower buds feature yellow centers crafted with the millefiori technique, a method also used in paperweights.
According to Frelinghuysen, the window parallels the light and color focus of Impressionist paintings, a connection she has explored since collaborating on a 1993 exhibition featuring Tiffany glass alongside Monet’s works. Both art forms use a multitude of colors to form cohesive images, with shared themes like hollyhocks, poplars, and gardens. Despite increasing male dominance at Tiffany over time, Northrop maintained her influence, managing her studio and leading the Tiffany Girls, whose craftsmanship is evident in this piece.
In 1912, Sarah Cochran, a prominent woman of the early 20th century, commissioned Northrop for her Tudor Revival mansion near Pittsburgh. After Cochran’s death in 1936, her mansion changed hands until a private buyer eventually sold the window to The Met. Scheduled for public display in November 2024 in the Charles Engelhard Court, the window aims to offer an “immersive, environmental experience.” Elizabeth McGoey, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, expressed her excitement about seeing one of Northrop’s works gain public attention at another institution.
