Tiffany stained-glass windows.(Current and coming)(Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate)

One could not help but notice when walking through the important and beautiful exhibition Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate, held recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, that Tiffany had a special affinity for his own stained-glass windows. There were numerous examples in the exhibition, as indeed there were at Laurelton Hall, Tiffany's house near Oyster Bay, Long Island. Visible in one period photograph that shows the raised piano alcove in the living hall of the house are no fewer than nine leaded-glass windows. In short, the room was what Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen has called "a veritable retrospective of Tiffany's work in the medium."

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Tiffany also supplied stained-glass windows for a large number of churches in this country, although it has been estimated that only 50 percent of them survive today. A series of seven eight-foot-tall windows topped by Gothic pointed arches each depicting the figure of an angel was rediscovered in Pennsylvania in 2001. They are the subject of an exhibition entitled In Company with Angels: Seven Tiffany Windows, opening at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington on September 23 and remaining on view until January 31, 2008.

These seven windows, made between 1902 and 1903 by Tiffany Studios, originally adorned the apse of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in Cincinnati, to which they had been donated by the congregation of the Swedenborgian church in Glendale, Ohio, in memory of Charles and Mary Allen.

The followers of Emanuel Swedenborg, the sect's founder, believe that angels play an important role in life because on earth humans are preparing to live as angels in heaven, or, in Swedenborg's words, "inwardly, a person is in company with angels, though unaware." The angels in the windows are found in the Book of Revelation, where ...