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Lot 30
Description:
Tiffany Studios
"Morning" Window, Designed by Elihu Vedder
manufactured by Tiffany Studios circa 1888
"Morning" designed by Elihu Vedder circa 1882-1883
leaded glass, hand-faceted glass jewels, drapery glass, mottled glass, glass roundels
10' x 6'
- Literature: For the Attached Painting Photo: Gift of Miss Anita Vedder to the Speed Art Musuem, Louisville, KY.
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Notes:
Elihu Vedder is today a well-known artist in the Symbolist movement, but in October 1881, when he returned to the United States from his home in Rome, Italy, he was desperate for a reliable source of income. Some years earlier he had become friends with D. Maitland Armstrong when the latter had lived in Rome working as a lawyer at the Vatican. Armstrong, a talented artist, gave up the law when he returned to the United States to take up art as a career. He became an important member of Louis C. Tiffany's various decorative-art enterprises (first Associated Artists, then Louis C. Tiffany and Co., and ultimately Tiffany Glass and Decorating Co.) until he left to open his own studio in 1886. When Vedder came back to New York, Armstrong was an important connection for him, introducing him to Tiffany and becoming a liaison between the two busy men. Tiffany and Vedder became friends.
In early November 1881, when Vedder had been in the city for only a month, Armstrong approached Vedder with a request from Tiffany to design several windows. The first was to depict a mermaid for the vestibule of the home of A. H. Barney on Park Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. Within a few days, Armstrong had also offered Vedder $200 for a version of Vedder's greeting card, designed for the stationer Louis Prang, depicting Aladdin and his lamp. Vedder received about the same amount for his paintings at the time and thus represented the same level of respect that a painting did. Tiffany tried to get Vedder to join his company – at the time, Tiffany was in the process of leaving Associated Artists, the interior decorating company he had formed with Candace Wheeler, to open Louis C. Tiffany and Co. Vedder, however flattered he may have been, knew he was first and foremost a painter, not a decorator, and declined the advance.
By early 1882, Vedder was making at least three window designs for the Tiffany company, including the Barney Mermaid, a sketch based on the door to Tiffany's home, and an unnamed church window. By the end of the year, Vedder was making drawings on speculation, hoping to sell them either for publication in magazines like The Century and Scribner's, or to Tiffany for windows. In November, he wrote to his wife, "I have made a beautiful design of a seated figure with ornamental background for stained glass which I will sell to Tiffany if they want it." This is the sketch for the window called Morning. It is the only one of Vedder's known window designs that shows a seated figure, and indeed the border, made up of stylized fish fins and tails, qualifies as a magnificent ornamental edging.
A few days later, Vedder mentioned another sketch: "… a drawing I have just made would do admirably printed in several tints. If they [Harper's Weekly] would pay me enough for it I would give it to them. Otherwise I will sell it to Tiffany to make a splendid glass window of or have T. [Tiffany] make it and get a share of the price. It is really striking and I have out-done myself in the ornamental border. I didn't think I could invent so good a one…" Because he mentions the ornamental border again, this may be the sketch for Morning, but it could be another one. Harper's did not immediately snatch up this drawing, so Vedder did in fact take it to Tiffany, who initially offered $150. A week later, Tiffany's bought it for $200.
Vedder continued to make window designs for Tiffany to fabricate. The largest group was for Christ Episcopal Church in Pomfret, CT, where he designed three figural windows and perhaps two ornamental ones in 1883. His last window was made by Tiffany in 1889 for St. John's Episcopal Church in Bangor, ME; sadly this was destroyed by fire and its appearance is unknown.5 This is no mention of that window in the Vedder correspondence – by this time he had returned to Rome and no longer needed to write to his wife, so there is no evidence of whether he created the design in 1888 or 1889, or if Tiffany used a previously purchased drawing.
The window called Morning (10' x 6') was made in 1888 from Vedder's 1883 sketch for the mansion called Croydon. This was built in Tarrytown, NY, by Timothy C. Eastman, who installed the window on a stair landing in the front of his house. This was recorded by the New York Times in 1891: T. C. Eastman, at his place in Tarrytown, has a magnificent window, 6 feet by 15. It is set in the stair landing, where the light is perfect, showing off the excellent work to the best advantage. The design, "Morning," is by Elihu Vedder. It shows a beautiful female figure, almost life-size, drawing aside the curtains of night, the first hints of dawn just coloring the landscape in the distance. The draperies in this window are very beautiful, every fold showing with full effect.
The window was larger than the original sketch. A round arch at the top continued the sumptuous borders in the sketch. A wide arabesque border with a golden background filled out the large size of the window opening.
When the house was demolished in 1958, the window was saved and ended up in a scrapyard, where it was purchased in 1960. It was restored in 2008, and thoroughly researched a short time later. Its rediscovery is an important contribution to the scholarship on Vedder and Tiffany, and the history of American stained glass.
Vedder's sketch for the window is now in the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, donated by his daughter Anita in 1938. Anita had become keeper of her father's legacy, dispersing his art works appropriately after his death.
Although Vedder talked to other stained-glass studios – including J. & R. Lamb in New York, Cook, Redding & Co. in Boston, and the Belcher Mosaic Co. in New Jersey – there is no indication that any of them ever made a window for him. He made the connections looking for someone to make windows from and to sell his "rings," three-dimensional glass jewels that he patented in 1882. Lamb and Cook, Redding turned him down, saying his rings were not for them. Belcher contracted with him to make the rings, but is not known to have made any windows. In his letters, Vedder never mentioned selling window designs to anyone else but Tiffany, and his wife and his lawyers never mentioned receiving any payments for stained glass from another studio.
In addition to this documentary evidence that Vedder's windows were always made by Tiffany Studios, there is the window itself, specifically its materials. In the early 1880s, Tiffany was on the cutting edge of the development and use of opalescent glass and glass jewels in stained-glass windows. Before 1885, opalescent glass was not in commercial production and much of it was custom made, as indicated by Tiffany's exclusive contract in 1881 with Louis Heidt, a glass maker in Brooklyn and one of the first to make opalescent glass. The very fact that Tiffany wanted this exclusivity, which forbade Heidt from selling it to anyone else, is a measure of the importance of this one factory. By 1885, commercial glass factories whose production was only opalescent glass were opening in West Virginia and Indiana, making it harder to identify window makers based on their glass, but earlier stock remained on the window makers' shelves. Even a window made in 1888, such as Morning, may contain earlier unique glass, as this one does.
For example, the use of drapery glass is not a sign of a Tiffany window – other glass furnaces made the glass and other studios used it in windows. But few used pieces made specifically for a given window. The pieces in Morning follow the folds shown in the sketch, a clear indication that they were custom made with the sketch at hand. No other stained-glass maker of this period except John La Farge had this kind of relationship with a glass factory. By 1888, Tiffany had also begun to make his own window glass and was producing drapery glass.
Hand-faceted glass jewels like those in Morning are also found extensively in Tiffany's work of this period, especially in Vedder's windows in Christ Church, Pomfret, CT, and Maitland Armstrong's windows for St. Columba's Chapel, the Berkeley Memorial, in Middletown, RI, which were made by Tiffany in 1886. Mottled glass, used in the arabesques in the border, was a new development in the 1880s that was used by Tiffany more than any other stained-glass firm of the period. Most unique are the dusty-turquoise roundels that are found in early Tiffany windows, such as the massive Allen Memorial Window in First Congregational Church, Pittsfield, MA from 1881, as well as in several windows in Pomfret.
Unfortunately, the painting of the original face was too badly deteriorated to identify a painter at the Tiffany Studios. Vedder himself would not have painted it; he was back in Rome when the window was made. At this time, Tiffany had not yet settled on a distinctive company figural style, which would happen when Frederick Wilson became the chief figural window designer in the early 1890s. The painters employed by the studio in the late 1880s are unknown, so their painting styles cannot be associated with any specific names.
In sum, from my perspective as a historian and conservator of stained-glass windows of this period, there is no doubt in my mind that the Morning window was fabricated by Tiffany Studios.
- Julie L. Sloan -
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September 27, 2025 11:00 AM EDT
Pittsfield, MA, US
Fontaine's Auction Gallery
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