This exceptional window, an ode to the bounty of autumn, stands among the finest windows produced by Tiffany for domestic interiors, featuring elements of important early designs by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Agnes F. Northrop. Incorporating large panels of “confetti” or “foliage” glass and pressed glass “jewels,” this masterpiece dates to a pivotal period when Tiffany and his designers were at the height of their creative powers, with access to a vast trove of custom-made glass.
The grapevine motif appears in some of the earliest Tiffany windows, including three renowned designs by Tiffany himself: The Antependium Window, adapted from an altar cloth exhibited in the Tiffany Chapel at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, in addition to the Autumn Panel from the Four Seasons Window and a monumental three-panel screen titled Grapes and Autumn Fruits, both exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, prominently feature clusters of grapes and coiling vines. The fruits in these early Tiffany windows are three-dimensional, formed by individual pieces of rounded pressed glass, often plated with multiple layers of glass on the reverse. Tiffany’s choice to prominently feature these particular designs at influential World’s Fairs underscores the importance of his innovations in leaded glass both artistically and economically; the positive reception of his exhibits led to an influx of commissions.
Grapevines were incorporated into designs for Tiffany Windows in public and private settings. In Memorial Windows, an 1896 promotional booklet, a reproduction of a design by Agnes F. Northrop depicts an asymmetrical grapevine framing a distant sunset. Of the 15 windows pictured to advertise Tiffany Glass & Decorating Co.’s Ecclesiastical Department, the Northrop window is the only example without obvious religious references; instead of including a saint or angel, Northrop relied on organic symbolism. The composition bears a number of similarities to the window offered here.
Coiling grapevines were also utilized in designs for residential clients, many of whom numbered among the most wealthy and influential figures in turn of the 20th century America. Samuel Bing, the prominent Art Nouveau dealer, declared in the 1896 that “there is scarcely a respectable house today whose entrance does not boast a stained glass overdoor.” To suit the grand scales of the interiors of these clients Tiffany Studios designed windows which cleverly utilized the surrounding architecture, bringing a verdant garden or conservatory into an interior space. Some of the most successful of these designs utilized the structural device of a symmetrical trellis or arbor laden with an asymmetrical vine, compositional elements likely inspired by Tiffany’s fascination with Japanese art.
This Grape Arbor Window utilizes rare early Tiffany Glass of the highest quality throughout. By 1900, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s personal glassworks in Corona, Queens had perfected the production of large panels of technically complex types of flat glass required to produce his artistic and evocative designs - including drapery, “foliage” or “confetti” glass, opalescent, and rippled glass, several of which appear in this design.
This window is particularly notable for the use of pressed glass for the grape clusters. Each individual grape is formed by a singular piece of rounded pressed Tiffany Glass in a variety of velvety tones ranging from wine through to concord purple and soft green, evoking the various stages of a ripening vine.
The use of these trompe l’oeil grapes seems to be focused around the mid-1890s to the early 1900s as Tiffany’s business managers likely sought more cost effective methods of producing a similar visual effect. In later windows the effect of three-dimensionality was achieved through the use of of mottled and opalescent glass, carefully selected and skillfully arranged to suggest the globular form of the fruits.
A related Grape Arbor window of similar proportions that also features pressed glass grapes is in the permanent collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, FL (70-031).
Height: 27 inches (68.6 cm)
Width: 78 ¼ inches (198.8 cm)
Depth: 1 ¾ inches (4.5 cm)