The Tiffany Windows at St Paul's Church Nantucket, with Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen

This lecture, presented at the Nantucket Whaling Museum for the Nantucket Historical Association, brings to light the work of Agnes Northrop, the only independent woman designer Tiffany employed. She designed some of the most memorable stained-glass windows to emerge from his studios, including likely those at St. Paul’s Church in Nantucket. In spite of her prominent role at the time, few windows have been attributed to her until recently, and her significance has been long overshadowed by Tiffany himself and by other women in his employ. Nonetheless, Northrop devoted her entire lifetime career at the Tiffany Studios and was responsible for such prestigious commissions as those for Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould. Northrop, under Tiffany’s aegis, introduced wholly new subjects to stained glass windows-landscapes and gardens-manifestations of artistic, religious, and environmental movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Tiffany windows are the highlight of the stained glass windows in St. Paul’s Church in Nantucket. They date from the construction of the church in 1902, and are true, classic Art Nouveau windows that are probably priceless today. The windows are beautiful and unusual. They depict landscapes and flowers, have no human images, and tell no “story.” The plant life depicted could be native to Nantucket.
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A graduate of Princeton University and the Winterthur/University of Delaware M.A. Program in Early American Culture, she has curated, published, and lectured widely on a variety of subjects relating to American ceramics, glass, stained glass, late nineteenth-century furniture, and the Gilded Age. Numerous exhibitions, articles, and publications have centered on the many aspects of the work of Louis C. Tiffany, including Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall-An Artist’s Country Estate (2006). In 2016 she was the Clarice Smith Distinguished Scholar Lecture for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and in 2014, she was awarded the Frederic E. Church Award for contributions to American Culture. Frelinghuysen recently authored two books, The Stained Glass Windows of St. Andrew’s Dune Church, and Gifts from the Fire: American Ceramics, 1880-1950. She serves on the board of Shelburne Museum, the Editorial Board of Ceramics in America, and is an emeritus board member of the American Ceramic Circle and the Princeton University Art Museum Advisory Council.