Head of School Bodie Brizendine welcomed Upper School students, faculty and staff as well as special guests including members of the Class of 1964 to the 30th annual Scolari Barr lecture by saluting the legacy of Margaret Scolari Barr who taught art history at Spence from 1943 to 1980. “She remains inspirational to the lives of our former students and the lives current students through this very lecture,” Brizendine said. This year’s lecture—The Other Tiffany Girl: Agnes Northrop, Designer of Windows—by Met Curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen honored this promise by shedding light on the important role played by women, particularly Northrop, in the work of the Tiffany Studios.

 

Frelinghuysen’s lecture shared insights about the historical framework of intense cultural, social and physical changes during the period when Louis Comfort Tiffany rose to prominence thanks to a new generation of Americans who acquired unprecedented personal fortunes. “Tiffany would make an indelible impact on this richly textured environment,” Frelinghuysen said, as she showed examples of windows at the Park Avenue Armory and St. Michael’s Church that are among the many New York City buildings boasting Tiffany’s stained-glass work.

 

Having worked at The Met since 1977, Frelinghuysen attributed her ability to focus an “endless inquiry” on Tiffany’s work to the strength of The Met’s collection. Her current project involves a study of 350 design drawings from Tiffany Studios that date from the early 1890s to 1920s. The collection, donated to the museum in 1967, “represents the only surviving evidence of some commissions or works long destroyed,” including a drawing of two options for a glass-encrusted birdbath designed for Spence alumna Laura Parsons Pratt, Class of 1913. It was the examination of these two signed drawings that sparked Frelinghuysen’s investigation of Northrop’s work. Northrop joined Tiffany in 1884, at the age of 27, stayed with the studio until it closed and she remained active in designing leaded glass windows until the age of 94. “She was quite simply one of Tiffany’s most important designers and the only significant woman designer,” Frelinghuysen said. Unlike the Tiffany Girls, a group of women who were responsible for the “critical phase of the production of Tiffany’s stained glass,” Northrop worked in her own studio. “She worked in his studios for her entire career as an independent woman at a time when there were few opportunities for women to earn a livelihood and women did not even have the right to vote,” Frelinghuysen shared.

 

Frelinghuysen used Scolari’s words, “The more you know about a work of art, the more it will come to life for you,” to delve into the various stages of design and the role of the Tiffany Girls in the construction of the intricately designed stained-glass windows and lamps. She also spoke about the influence of landscapes, gardens and the spiritualism conveyed by nature on the 19th century stained-glass design. “Northrop designed one of Tiffany’s earliest landscape windows in 1895 for the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn,” she said. Frelinghuysen shared several examples of Northrop’s work, tracing the many ways her design was influenced by her interest in nature and photography. Summing up Northrop’s contribution, Frelinghuysen offered: “Northrop, in her extraordinary five-decade-long career at Tiffany Studios, broke new barriers in a field dominated by men. In connecting the worlds of landscape and gardens with painting and stained glass, she created extraordinary, illusionistic depictions that are perennial manifestations of the artistic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Please click here to view or download a video of Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen’s lecture

 

 

 

 

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, has published widely and curated exhibitions on American ceramics and glass, as well as late 19th century decorative arts, especially the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. A graduate of Princeton University, she earned her M.A. at the Winterthur Program in early American culture. In 2009, she oversaw the curatorial team that reinstalled the American Wing’s Charles Engelhard Court, and in 2016 curated the installation of the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room and organized the complementary exhibition, as well as co-authored the accompanying Met Bulletin on the Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age. She is currently working on a book on the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American Art Pottery.