Museum Accessions.(Westmoreland Museum acquires Tiffany window)(Brief Article)

About 1905 Thomas Lynch (1854-1914), the general manager since 1891 of the Henry C. Frick Coke Company in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, decided to build a grand new residence on West Pittsburgh Street in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. To light the staircase landing, he commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to create the stained-glass window illustrated here, which, most fittingly, has recently been returned to Greensburg, having been acquired by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art there. It is the museum's only work by Tiffany.

In a deviation from his more usual practice, Tiffany accommodated Lynch's desire to incorporate a specific view in the window, portraying the thatched-roof farmhouse in Ballyduff, county Waterford, Ireland, where Lynch's father, Patrick, had been born and from which his grandfather had brought the family to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in the 1850s. A period photograph of the house confirms that Tiffany rendered it faithfully in the stained-glass window, even down to the flowers in the window boxes.

The window remained in the Greensburg house for some forty years while the house was successively occupied by Thomas Lynch and by his wife into widowhood, and finally by their son Thomas Lynch Jr. Having no children, Thomas Lynch Jr. and his wife sold the house to Colonel W John Stiteler Jr., who removed the window to his country house in Rockwood, Pennsylvania. From thence ...