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Art

Met Exhibition Showcases Tiffany Designs & Finished Objects

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The Met to Present the First Major Exhibition Dedicated to the Design Drawings for Louis C. Tiffany’s Celebrated Gilded Age Creations

Newly conserved works reveal the creative process behind Tiffany Studios’most celebrated stained-glass windows, lamps, mosaics,and interiors.

This exhibition will reunite two major stained-glass windows with their original design drawings for the first time in nearly half a century—This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany, a major exhibition exploring the creative process behind some of Tiffany Studios’ most celebrated works.

Four Seasons in Glass

On view from October 22, 2026, through February 7, 2027, the exhibition brings together nearly 120 works from the Museum’s collection—along with a select group of key loans—to examine the artistic range of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the collaborative studio that produced significant works of American decorative art.

A major loan from the Chrysler Museum of Art reunites its monumental stained-glass window, Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria(1911), with the original wisteria transoms designed for the work. Recently discovered in a private home in Arizona, the transoms make possible the ensemble’s first presentation together in at least half a century.

The exhibition is made possible by Tiffany & Co. “The Met’s unparalleled collection of design drawings from the studios of Louis C. Tiffany reveals how some of the most iconic works of American decorative art came to life,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer.

“The exhibition illuminates the artistry, innovation, and collaboration at the heartof Tiffany studios, while offering new insights into the cultural and aesthetic ambitions of the Gilded Age.”

Design for interior of First Presbyterian Church.

Largest Collection Of Tiffany Drawings In The World

“This exhibition builds on decades of conservation and sustained study of The Met’s extraordinary holdings—the largest collection of Tiffany design drawing s anywhere,” said Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, The Met’s Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts.

“As these works have been conserved to their full beauty, they reveal the richness and complexity of the studio’s creative process. The reunion of two major windows side by side.

Press Release_Tiffany Drawings.pdf

The exhibition allows visitors to see the transformation of an idea into a luminous work of art.

Spanning the early 1890s through the 1920s, Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany also highlights the extraordinary breadth and ambition from the studios of Louis C. Tiffany, from stained-glass windows and lamps to mosaics, enamels, textiles, and interiors created for private homes, houses of worship, theaters, and public buildings during America’s Gilded Age. These rarely seen works on paper—from quick working sketches to luminous watercolor presentation drawings—offer an unprecedented behind-the-scenes view of the collaborative artistic process that shaped the studios of Louis C. Tiffany commissions across the United States as well as in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Switzerland.

Many of the drawings on view document works that have since been lost, altered, or never realized, offering invaluable information about Louis C. Tiffany’s artistic vision and the breadth of his studio’s output. Organized thematically across three galleries, the exhibition explores designs for domestic interiors, ecclesiastical settings, and public and commercial commissions alongside Tiffany’s pioneering work in lighting.

Select loans—including stained-glass windows, lamps, and decorative objects—will be presented in dialogue with their corresponding drawings, allowing visitors to trace the transformation from concept to finished work. A central focus of the exhibition is the collaborative nature of Tiffany studios, which brought together adiverse group of designers, many of whom were historically uncredited. The presentation will highlight the contributions of not just Tiffany but other key figures, among them émigré and women designers—British-trained Frederick Wilson and Swiss-born Jacob Holzeras well as Agnes Northrop, Clara Driscoll, and Julia Munson—while shedding light on the broader network of artists and artisans whose work shaped Tiffany’s distinctive aesthetic.

In addition, Designing the Gilded Age will examine the conservation of these fragile works on paper, with interpretive materials and digital components revealing the discoveries made through decades of study and preservation. The Gilded Age, a period of unprecedented economic growth in late 19th-and early 20th-century America, produced the major cultural institutions of New York and the nation, including The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, founded in 1870.

Against the backdrop of that formative period, the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany flourished.

Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany also situates Tiffany’s work within the broader cultural and economic context of this period that was marked by rapid industrial growth and an expanding market for luxury goods. The drawings reveal the role of design in shaping immersive environments—from domestic interiors to sacred and civic spaces across the United States and abroad.

Exhibition Credits

The exhibition is organized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, The Met’s Anthony W. and Lulu C. WangCurator of American Decorative Arts, with Barbara Veith, Research Associate, TheAmerican Wing. A fully illustrated catalogue by Frelinghuysen and other authors, published by The Met, will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation. Additional support is provided by the William Cullen Bryant Fellows of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation, and Arlie Sulka.

For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.

Art

The Met Acquires Monumental Tiffany Window

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(New York, December, 2023)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of a monumental Tiffany three-part window, Garden Landscape. The window—over ten feet wide and nearly seven feet tall—was designed by Agnes Northrop in the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the attribution of which is based on a signed design drawing for the center panel that resides in The Met collection.

As part of the Museum’s American Wing 100th anniversary, the window will be installed in the Charles Engelhard Court in November 2024. The window will be dramatically framed by the columns from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island country estate.

The acquisition is made possible by Alan Gerry Gift; 2023 Benefit Fund; Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; funds and gifts from various donors, by exchange; Ronald S. Kane Bequest, in memory of Berry B. Tracy; Lila Acheson Wallace, several members of The Chairman’s Council, The Erving and Joyce Wolf Foundation, Martha J. Fleischman, Elizabeth J. and Paul De Rosa, Women and the Critical Eye, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Lockwood Chilton Jr., Cheryl and Blair Effron, The Felicia Fund, Julie and James Alexandre, Elizabeth and Richard Miller, Anonymous, John and Margaret Ruttenberg, and The Gerald H. Ruttenberg Foundation Gifts.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said: “This stunning work of art is an extraordinary example of the transformational creativity of Agnes Northrop and Tiffany Studios. Magnificent in concept and execution and more than grand in size, it deepens the American Wing’s Tiffany holdings and will enhance the already stunning Engelhard Court with a powerful, immersive viewing experience.”

Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at The Met, said: “Northrop’s remarkable environmental work further strengthens our representation of women artists in the American Wing and allows us to share broader stories of early-20th-century culture with our visitors.”

The window was originally commissioned by Sarah Cochran, Pittsburgh businesswoman and philanthropist, for Linden Hall, the grand Tudor-Revival estate she had built in 1912 in Dawson, Pennsylvania. She personally requested the subject of the window, which represents a lush landscape and garden suggestive of her own at the estate. Placed on the stair landing of the house, the window enticed the viewer up marble steps and offered a long vista through tall, majestic pines flanking a central fountain amidst profuse flowers—pink and blue hydrangeas, poppies, and nasturtiums. The two side panels depict, on the left, foxglove and peonies, and on the right, hollyhocks, exquisitely rendered in glass. These were subjects favored by Northrop and American Impressionist painters.

Northrop was one of the most important designers in Tiffany’s employ and his preeminent woman designer. In a field dominated by men, Northrop established herself as one of the leading designers of windows, and was recognized for her work by winning a prestigious award at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. She helps shed light on the critical and often unrecognized role played by women in the art of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Northrop and Tiffany pioneered new landscape and garden subject matter for stained glass, and the window reveals Northrop’s careful observations of nature and her gift for translating it into glass.

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, said: “This extraordinary evocation of a garden landscape is Northrop’s masterpiece. Made during the height of Louis Tiffany’s career, it was conceived, commissioned, and crafted by women. Featuring flowers in bloom from spring through summer, seen in the enigmatic light of approaching twilight, the window presents a luxuriant garden perennially in bloom.”

Tiffany’s opalescent glass shares a zeitgeist with American Impressionism, merging imagery with chromatic light. Northrop exploited the varied textures, lush colors, and light effects that were only possible with Tiffany’s special Favrile glass made at his furnaces in Corona, Queens, utilizing especially innovative and unusual techniques, some unique in a stained-glass window. The ingenious selection of the glass as well as the cutting of the glass into often thousands of pieces of almost impossible shapes was done by Tiffany’s skilled artisans, who were also largely women. Tiffany deemed the Linden Hall window of such note that he put it on public view in his New York showroom before shipping it to Cochran’s Pennsylvania home.
Featured image: Image: Three-part Garden Landscape window for Linden Hall, Designed by Agnes F. Northrop (1857–1953), Tiffany Studios (1902–32), New York, 1912. Leaded Favrile glass. 124 × 82 inches; 88 3/4 × 81 5/8 inches; 88 3/4 × 81 5/8 inches; center panel: 124 × 82 in. (315 × 208.3 cm); side panels: 88 3/4 × 81 5/8 in. (225.4 × 207.3 cm)