The scene Friday at Second Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s Near South Side suggested both the precision of a research lab and the subdued ardor of a religious service. Under the watchful eye of conservationists Arthur Femenella and John Wardell Clark, 12 stained-glass enthusiasts finished a week of painstaking restoration on two of the church’s nine windows.
This wasn’t ordinary stained glass, but the work of the art form’s master: Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The son of a jewel magnate, Tiffany revolutionized the making of stained glass by imbuing the glass with color, rather than painting the color on, and by layering different colors of glass to create a three-dimensional effect. The result was a deepened perspective that in a way made his work a Gilded Age version of today’s virtual reality.
“To see these Tiffany windows up close was simply beyond words,” said Cynthia Krabbe, owner of a stained-glass business in Berlin, Md., who paid her way for the chance to restore a Tiffany window.
The job requires patience, dedication and a sharp eye. A decorative artist whose name became synonymous with this centuries-old form, Tiffany, who died in 1933 at the age of 85, redefined stained glass.
Before Tiffany, artists painted colors and images onto glass in a process that sealed light. But he chose not to use any paint at all, instead treating glass in his furnaces in order to create whatever visual effects he desired.
To embed colors and images in his opalescent, pressed, jeweled and rippled glass, the New York-born artist pioneered techniques that allowed light to filter through the medium. And even though he may not have understood them, Tiffany invented new chemical processes that made his glass behave more like prisms–amplifying some light frequencies while subduing others.
His achievements make restoration efforts even more delicate. And the colored translucence of a Tiffany window still evokes awe.
“Part of his genius was being able to produce the glass that would suggest those lines as they were needed in an image so that it could all be done with the glass itself, rather than any over-painting,” said Don Kalec, a professor of historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“He really worked with a great degree of artistry and technical virtuosity,” said Alastair Duncan, a New York-based Tiffany specialist who has written six books on Tiffany.
Femenella was more concise: “He expanded the palette of glass that an artist could use.”
At their peak at the turn of the century, Tiffany’s variously named companies were an industry with 1,000 employees, from artisans and glass-blowers to bankers and shippers. His clients included Mark Twain and President Chester Arthur. (Theodore Roosevelt got rid of the Tiffany’s handiwork in the White House after he was elected).
“He was really a conductor who had a great sense of detail and precision even as he kept the whole operation in concert,” said Neal Vogel of Inspired Partnership, a church-based group that is overseeing the restoration effort.
Tiffany also produced varied works in glass for private collectors as well as churches, hospitals and private clubs. Specialists estimate that he made between 25,000 and 30,000 stained-glass windows in his career. “The sheer volume of his output is bewildering,” said Duncan.
Tiffany’s innovations were aided by the fact that he owned a glass-blowing furnace in Corona, N.Y., where he was able to create material to specifications. For example, if a piece called for a religious figure to be draped in certain vestments, the clothing could be created in glass with the correct colors.
He made significant innovations in executing his supple images, which are subtly beautiful and often suggest liquidity. Tiffany, who studied painting in Paris as a youth and who developed a mastery of light and color in North Africa, used layers of different shades of glass–a process called plating–to achieve his magnificent effects.
“One of his great contributions to stained glass, which was viciously resisted at the time, is the three-dimensional perspective,” said Duncan. “Up until the Civil War, the flat, two-dimensional European perspective was de rigueur.”
His great interest was colors–rich, sumptuous and brilliant hues, said Kalec. “Part of his genius was being able to produce the glass that would suggest those lines so that it could all be done with the glass itself, rather than any over-painting.”
Tiffany, who inherited $35 million of his father’s fortune, began as an interior designer. But his career took off at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, where his chapel exhibit won 54 gold medals. His highest achievements are arguably in his opalescent windows.
A leader in the Hudson River school of artists, which exploited the play of dark and light–chiaroscuro–Tiffany was able to manipulate light because of his kaleidoscopic inventory of 5,000 different colored types of glass.
At Second Presbyterian, where some of the Tiffany windows predate a 1900 fire, his work comes alive in light. The understated “Pastoral Scene,” on the north side interior of the Gothic structure, features subtle, almost opaque lighting while “Christ Blessing the Little Children” features Jesus in a brilliant red robe.
There are many other Tiffany works in the Chicago metropolitan area. For example, First Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest has several Tiffany windows, while the lobby of the Marquette Building on South Dearborn Street features a Tiffany mosaic. And the south rotunda of Marshall Field’s State Street store sports a Tiffany dome.
The value of the volunteers’ work at Second Presbyterian, 1936 S. Michigan Ave., was about $10,000, according to Vogel. But it was matched by their enthusiasm.
Said Donna Weiss of Chicago: “If you’re not a stained-glass expert, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work on something like this.”
