Women and the Art of Tiffany Studios: A Garden Landscape Window

This lecture will focus on an extraordinary new acquisition at the Met from the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany of a luxuriant garden landscape. An exceptional work of art on all levels, it also holds several stories that are critical to its conception and realization, many of which highlight the important, but often overlooked, part played by women in the art of Louis Tiffany. The lecture will explore the roles of the window’s patron and designer, as well as the women who crafted it.

It will also highlight innovations made by Tiffany Studios’ in glass and will place the window within the broader cultural landscape of the United States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Light refreshments will be offered following the presentation.

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen graduated from Princeton University and earned an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She started her career at the Metropolitan Museum as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. Since then, Frelinghuysen has curated, published, and lectured widely on the subject of American ceramics, glass, stained glass, and late 19th-century furniture, as well as all aspects of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 2016, she was invited to be 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’s purview includes 18th- to early 20th-century ceramics and glass; furniture of the Gilded Age and Arts & Crafts Movement; and the work of Louis C. Tiffany. In addition to her permanent displays, including oversight of the 2009 Charles Engelhard Court reinstallation, she has curated exhibitions and authored publications on a wide range of topics. Frelinghuysen was the lead curator of the exhibition, “Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age,” which includes the installation of the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room in The American Wing, and an exhibition on the furniture of George A. Schastey. She co-authored a book on the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American Art Pottery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frelinghuysen is currently the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has published widely on American glass, ceramics, stained glass, Gilded Age furniture and patronage, and many aspects of the work of Louis C. Tiffany.

LMMM’s Lecture Series is sponsored in part by The DiNardo-Aiello Family Fund Designer/Artist/Author Gail Ingis and Ronald & Joanne Salvatore.

LMMM’s 2025 programs are made possible in part by LMMM’s Founding Patrons: The Estate of Mrs. Cynthia Clark Brown; LMMM’s Leadership Patrons: Dr. Michele & Attorney Miklos Koleszar and The Sealark Foundation; and LMMM’s 2025 Season Distinguished Benefactors: The City of Norwalk, The Maurice Goodman Foundation, Inc., and Lockwood-Mathews Foundation, Inc.

Images courtesy of Alice Cooney Freylinghusen and the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 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)

Host or Publisher Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum