Menu Contact/Location

Author Archives: ianowens

  1. Howard Gilman Wilbert (1891-1966), Pittsburgh

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Howard Gilman Wilbert (1891-1966), Pittsburgh: Nave windows, from windows designed and made 1939-62 for the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer; E. Donald Robb, for Frohman, Robb & Little, architects

    Photographs of stained glass windows by Glenn Lewis © 2009/glennlewisimages.com. Text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. Photograph of The Church of the Redeemer © 1998 William Rydberg PHOTON for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.

    As the craftsman selects the pieces of colored glass and puts them together in various combinations, he becomes more and more fascinated by the infinite variety of effects to be obtained, and to have a profound love and respect for the material that makes this possible.

    –Howard G. Wilbert

     

     

    Despite its comparative youth—Pittsburgh’s Episcopal Church of the Redeemer was designed and built 1936-37—the building incorporates earlier structures erected after the parish was established in 1903. According to James D. Van Trump, the principal structure, a stucco building of 1913, was “turned around, set on new foundations, encased in Gothic stone work, and a stone tower was added.” The new building cradles the old. The Church of the Redeemer, in Jamie’s words, exhibits “a fineness of scale and proportion and an amiable forthrightness of aspect that make it one of the best things of its kind in Pittsburgh.” The same might be said of the stained glass windows, created over more than two decades by one craftsman, Howard Gilman Wilbert.

    Wilbert was born in Pittsburgh and attended Stevenson Art School, operated by Horatio S. Stevenson, a respected Pittsburgh painter who had studied in New York and Paris, and became the first president of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in 1910. That same year Wilbert began an apprenticeship with Pittsburgh Stained Glass Studio (founded in 1904 and still in business). After serving in World War I, Wilbert worked with Charles J. Connick in Boston for over a year before returning to Pittsburgh and his old firm. He became a partner and served as chief designer for 35 years.

    Wilbert was a parishioner at the Church of the Redeemer and he and the rector, Hugh S. Clark, planned the iconographic program for the windows, all of which Wilbert designed and made between 1939 and 1962. The nave windows depict Biblical figures, such as Saint John the Evangelist (shown here) and St. Joseph of Arimathea, and saints of the British Isles: S.S. Cuthbert (shown here), Aidan, Oswald, Columba, Finnian, Brennan, and Patrick.

    Other notable Wilbert glass in Pittsburgh includes windows at the Church of the Ascension (1918), East Liberty Presbyterian Church (c. 1931-35), St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (1961-62), and contributions to windows in the Hungarian and Russian Nationality Rooms and the Stephen Foster Memorial at the University of Pittsburgh.

    One stained glass window in the Church of the Redeemer not by Wilbert is the sacristy window by Connick Associates of Boston in memory of Hugh S. Clark (1903-1992).

    The architect of the Church of the Redeemer, E. Donald Robb (1880-1942), apprenticed with Theophilus Parsons Chandler and Cope & Stewardson in Philadelphia and worked in both the Boston and New York offices of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. (Robb prepared the presentation drawing for Bertram Goodhue’s First Baptist Church in Pittsburgh.) Robb left CG&F in 1911 to form Brazer & Robb [1911-14] with Clarence W. Brazer. Robb returned to CG& F in 1914. Sometime after 1918, Robb formed a partnership with CG&F employee Harry B. Little (1883-1944); they were joined by Philip H. Frohman (1887-1972). Frohman, Robb & Little is best known for completing the Washington National Cathedral.

    Sources: Howard G. Wilbert, “Charles J. Connick: Stained Glass Craftsman and Friend,” Stained Glass 41 (Autumn 1946): 76-79. Hugh S. Clark, The Stained Glass Windows in the Church of the Redeemer Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, n.d.). James D. Van Trump and Arthur P. Ziegler, Landmark Architecture of Allegheny County Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh 1967): 107-108.

    Illustrations

    1. The Church of the Redeemer (1998)
    2. Saint John
    3. Saint Cuthbert

    The Church of the Redeemer (1998)
    Saint John

    Saint Cuthbert

  2. Henry Wynd Young (1874-1923), New York

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Henry Wynd Young (1874-1923), New York: “Christ Enthroned,” c. 1922, Chapel chancel window in East Liberty Presbyterian Church; Ralph Adams Cram for Cram & Ferguson. Window originally installed in a transept of the previous building, Longfellow, Alden & Harlow (1886-88), architects

    Photograph of “Christ Enthroned” and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    One of the finest stained glass windows in Pittsburgh, designed and made by one of the most gifted glass artists working in 20th-century America, is only intermittently visible. Located in the chapel of East Liberty Presbyterian Church, it is obscured by liturgical banners only removed for special occasions such as weddings, concerts, and funerals. The name of the window and its precise date are as yet unknown. For convenience sake we will call it “Christ Enthroned,” note that the design was exhibited in Pittsburgh in 1922, and that the window was installed in a transept in the 1888 church building, demolished in 1931 to make way for the current building designed by Ralph Adams Cram.

    Scottish stained glass artist and historian Rona H. Moody has determined that Henry Wynd Young was born in Bannockburn, Scotland, in 1874, was living in Aberdeen by 1881, and attended evening classes at Gray’s School of Art there 1889-c. 1896. A decade later—a decade presumably spent working in glass firms (as yet unidentified)—Young arrived in New York on May 10, 1907; his wife Bessie and year-old son Henry Walter left Aberdeen and came to the United States, arriving New York on November 6, 1907. A second son, Alexander, was born in New York City in 1908. Young and his family settled in Brooklyn where he established his own business.

    Young exhibited some of his designs at the Architectural League of New York in 1914. The following year he formed a partnership with G. Owen Bonawit (1890-1971). Fellow Scot John Gordon Guthrie (1874-1961) joined the firm that year and subsequently they were joined by Irish glazer Ernest Lakeman (1882-1948). The Bonawit & Young partnership dissolved in 1918. Young moved his residence to Hamilton, New York; he died there on December 25, 1923. Guthrie stayed on until 1925 and Lakeman operated Young’s glass shop for several years thereafter. According to the 1930 census, Bessie T. Young was president of the firm and Henry Walter Young worked there as a stained glass painter.

    In 1919 Bertram Goodhue wrote of Young: “there is no doubt in my mind that he is far and away the best glass stainer we have.” Ralph Adams Cram thought so highly of Young’s work that he included him posthumously in his 1924 survey of the best stained glass firms then working in America. Windows by Young can be found, most notably, at St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City; Emmanuel Church, Newport, R.I.; Church of the Redeemer, Morristown, New Jersey; and East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

    In 1922 Young participated in an exhibition of stained glass organized by Lawrence B. Saint (a Pittsburgh glass artist who established the Washington National Cathedral’s stained glass studio in 1928)—Stained Glass: Original Windows, Designs, Cartoons, Drawings of Medieval Windows, held November 13-December 16, 1922 at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. One of the items Young exhibited was “Sketch design of transept, East Liberty Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” The finished window, left to right, shows Old Testament figures Elijah above and Hannah and her son Samuel below; Christ enthroned above the twelve apostles in the center; and, from the New Testament, St. Paul above and Mary and the infant Jesus below.

    There is as yet no comprehensive assessment of Young’s work. The iconography and the colors of his windows evoke medieval English glass while displaying “a wry and sophisticated sense of character,” in James Sturm’s apt phrase. Young operated a small shop, assisted by a few gifted associates, a practice influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. Charles J. Connick, educated and trained in Pittsburgh, advocated an Arts and Crafts approach in his Boston studio. He wrote of Young:

    The late Henry Wynd Young re-created with sensitiveness and charm the forms familiar to students of fifteenth-century glass in England. He was searched out by appreciative architects and churchmen who were not satisfied by advertisers and salesmen. Through opportunities they gave him he has left us a few examples of exquisite windows . . . . He helped to make a place in America for the artist-craftsman who need not be heralded by salesmen and publicity agents.

    Sources: Bertram G. Goodhue correspondence 1903-24, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts library, Columbia University. Ralph Adams Cram, “Stained Glass: An Art Restored; America’s Position in Bringing About a Renaissance of This Phase of Architectural Beauty,” Arts and Decoration 20 (February 1924): 11-13, 50. Charles J. Connick, Adventures in Light and Color (New York 1937): 176. James L. Sturm, Stained Glass From Medieval Times to the Present: Treasures to Be Seen in New York (New York 1982): 72. Special thanks to Peter Cormack, Rona H. Moody, and Wayne H. Kempton, Archivist, Episcopal Diocese of New York.

    Illustrations

    1. East Liberty Presbyterian Church (1888-1931). Photograph taken from Georgina G. Negley, East Liberty Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh 1919): following page 118.
    2. “Christ Enthroned”

    East Liberty Presbyterian Church (1888-1931).  Photograph taken from Georgina G. Negley, East Liberty Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh 1919): following page 118.

    “Christ Enthroned”

  3. George W. Sotter (1879-1953), Pittsburgh

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    George W. Sotter (1879-1953), Pittsburgh: St. Matthew and St. John, 1914-15, Synod Hall; Edward J. Weber, architect

    Photographs of St. Matthew and St. John and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    The invention of opalescent glass and the “painterly” approach to glass windows that prized pictorial realism above all were largely byproducts of the prevailing “American Renaissance.” By 1910 the character of stained glass art in the United States had changed. Around 1900 Otto Heinigke of Brooklyn began combining native opalescent glass with traditional hand-blown antique glass, and revived leading as a technical and aesthetic component in window making. In 1902 Harry E. Goodhue, brother of architect Bertram G. Goodhue, revived medieval techniques and iconography in the first large all-antique glass window in the United States in Newport, Rhode Island; this was followed by a similar window designed and made 1904-05 by William Willet at the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. Influenced by William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, American glass artists came to appreciate the architectural character of windows as openings in the wall rather than as self-referential glass paintings. The purity of color and the architectural fitness of the medieval stained glass window was no longer viewed as primitive but was now seen as an appropriate and technologically sophisticated element in a new architectural language based on medieval forms, begun by H. H. Richardson and subsequently championed by architects Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and other adherents of 20th-century American Gothic.

    Heinigke, Harry Goodhue, and Willet had all been trained as painters before working with stained glass and they had tentatively made the journey from one medium to another. Their pioneering efforts made it possible for those in the following generation to more readily recognize that different techniques and approaches were required by the easel painter and the stained glass craftsman. Some artists found both worlds congenial.

    George William Sotter was one such artist. Born into a Roman Catholic family in Pittsburgh, he apprenticed in several glass shops before studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at the urging of Horace Rudy. In a memorial tribute to Rudy he recalled:

    I had come under William Willet, and worked in four shops before meeting Rudy. I shall never forget how Rudy received me, looked at my paintings and gave me an opportunity to work with him. In glass as well as in painting he fed me with his enthusiasm to keep going and keep trying. He was always happy over any success that came to me. He gave and loaned me books, took me to plays . . . . He saw to it that I met all his friends,—Henri, Sloan and Redfield,—saw that I had a leave of absence to go to the Pennsylvania Academy. Then when I studied under Redfield, he extended my leave two more months.

    Joan Gaul tells us that Sotter attended the Pennsylvania Academy 1901-02 and returned to Rudy Brothers in 1903. There he met Alice Bennet (1883-1967), who entered the Rudy shop as an apprentice in 1904; they married in 1907.

    Sotter successfully—often simultaneously—painted, taught painting, and designed stained glass. He exhibited paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Carnegie Institute, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, 1904, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D. C. He was active in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (established 1910), participating in their annual exhibitions. He taught painting at Carnegie Institute of Technology 1910-1919 in Pittsburgh. He designed stained glass for Pittsburgh Stained Glass Company and Petgen Company, and he and his wife collaborated on stained glass projects.

    Sotter’s first documented windows, installed in the Church of the Epiphany in Pittsburgh as part of a 1910 renovation supervised by architect John T. Comes, are simple, primarily geometric, and self-effacing. (Sotter has been credited with the original 1903 windows; these are not his work but were almost certainly made by Ludwig von Gerichten of Columbus, Ohio.) At least two churches from this period that had Sotter windows have been demolished, although his 1911 clerestory windows in Comes’ St. Gertrude, Vandergrift, survive.

    Sotter’s first noteworthy stained glass windows are in the Synod Hall and Chancery building, adjacent to St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, seat of the Pittsburgh Diocese. The windows, in place when the building opened April 12, 1915, include secondary windows in the library, offices, the auditorium stairway, and the impressive, almost life-sized twelve apostles who light the balcony in the auditorium. The Gazette Times described the twelve apostles:

    The windows are so designed that the light from the outside filtering through their prismatic colors makes pure white light. The hall is not to be used every hour of the day, nor for reading, nor writing, nor for office purposes: hence very little natural light is required. The twilight of a clear day is perhaps the most favorable time for appreciating the amazing, deep, gem-like coloring of the windows. The tones are as rich and as soft as those of a Persian rug, and the black lead lines give a continual contrast to the glowing labyrinth of translucent jewels. The windows are 12 in number, each dedicated to an apostle, each twinkling with an almost barbaric burst of color.

    Notable windows followed in the Diocese of Pittsburgh; in particular those at St. Agnes, 1917-18 (now the Carlow University chapel) and St. Paul of the Cross Monastery, 1919. In 1919, the Sotters moved to Holicong, Pa. in Bucks County. George Sotter painted (one of his paintings recently sold for $110,000) and the Sotters continued to create stained glass windows. A group of windows created for St. Canice Church in Pittsburgh c. 1930 has been reinstalled at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the Sotters’ most notable achievement are the windows for Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, designed and made between 1930 and 1954 and completed by Alice Sotter after her husband’s death in 1953.

    Synod Hall was designed by Edward J. Weber (1877-1968). Weber apprenticed with architectural firms in Boston and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He arrived in Pittsburgh c. 1906 and designed a substantial number of handsome schools (public as well as parochial) and ecclesiastical buildings and wrote about church architecture. George Sotter designed the windows for Edward Weber’s St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Wheeling, West Virginia.

    Sources: “The Pittsburg Stained Glass Co.,” Up-Town, Greater Pittsburg’s Classic Section; East End, The World’s Most Beautiful Suburb (Pittsburgh Board of Trade, 1907), n.p. “Art.” The Index, 22 June 1907: 25. Lawrence B. Saint, “The Art of a Pittsburgher,” The Bulletin, 14 May 1910: 11. “Building a Triumph,” Gazette Times, 12 April 1915. George Sotter, “J. Horace Rudy, Master of Friendship,” Stained Glass 35 (Spring 1940): 32-33. Jean M. Farnsworth, “Biographical Sketches of Stained: 45, 53, 55.

    Illustrations

    1. Synod Hall. Photograph taken from Edward J. Weber, Catholic Ecclesiology (Pittsburgh 1927): Plate XIV.
    2. St. Matthew
    3. St. John

    Synod Hall.  Photograph taken from Edward J. Weber, Catholic Ecclesiology (Pittsburgh 1927):  Plate XIV.

    St. Matthew

    St. John

  4. Leo Thomas (1876-1950) for George Boos (1859-1937), Munich, Germany

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Leo Thomas (1876-1950) for George Boos (1859-1937), Munich, Germany: Chancel window and detail of transept angel, 1910-11, St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Butler, Pa., John T. Comes, architect; “Tu Es Petrus” and St. George, 1911-12, St. George’s Roman Catholic Church; Herman J. Lang, architect

    Photographs and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    “Munich glass”—stained glass made in Munich, Germany (then the kingdom of Bavaria)—originated during the reign of Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786-1868) who sought to turn his capital into an unrivaled center of German art and culture. The leading Munich glass firms were Mayer & Co., founded by Josef Gabriel Mayer and later led by his son Franz, and F. X. Zettler (the firms later merged; Mayer & Co. is still in business). Jean Farnsworth tells us that Mayer & Co. was founded in 1847 to make ecclesiastical furnishings. Josef Gabriel’s son-in-law, Franz Xavier Zettler, organized the firm’s glass workshop in the 1860s, then founded his own glass firm in 1870. Both companies quickly won royal and papal endorsements. Mayer & Co. and Zettler opened sales offices in the U.S.A. in 1888 and c. 1902 respectively. Their earliest documented glass in the Pittsburgh Diocese dates to 1890.

    The artistic language of Munich glass owed much to the revival of religious painting, especially fresco painting, in Germany early in the 19th-century. Kathleen Curran notes: “The fresco revival had its origins in Rome in 1812, when the young Peter Cornelius sought out Friederich Overbeck and joined the Brotherhood of St. Luke. Cornelius’s special contribution to that movement was the renewal of fresco painting in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance masters, especially Masaccio, Raphael, and Michelangelo.” Ludwig I sent German art and German artists to the United States. Curran observes that St. Vincent’s Benedictine Abbey in Latrobe, Pa, forty miles west of Pittsburgh, received some 300 paintings from King Ludwig, and Munich-trained artists like William Lamprecht taught fresco painting at St. Vincent; he and pupils like Bonaventure Ostendarp and Raphael Pfisterer painted religious art in Roman Catholic churches throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Mid-Western states during the second half of the 19th century.

    Although Munich windows were made of traditional hand-blown antique glass, both Munich windows and American opalescent windows typically eschew the flatness and emphatic leading of medieval windows in favor of an idealized naturalism and spatial realism. Wealthy Protestants might prefer opalescent windows, which were complicated and expensive to make, but Munich glass windows could be imported as art, i.e., glass “paintings” and—exempt from a high tariff on imported “raw” glass—cost less than opalescent windows and windows made in America using imported glass. Although often derided by English glass artists as too pictorial, and viewed as an economic threat by American glass firms, the broad aesthetic appeal, economic advantage, and papal approval made Munich glass windows the overwhelming choice among Roman Catholics in the United States.

    George Boos of Munich began his career at Mayer & Co., then established his own firm c. 1880. Shortly thereafter, his 7-year-old nephew Leo Thomas, born in London, moved to Munich. Leo studied at the Munich Arts & Crafts School and the Museum of Fine Arts. He traveled to Italy, Tunis, and, in 1906, England. Jean Farnsworth observes: “Leo sometimes developed designs for windows based on cartoons in the Victoria & Albert Museum, including those of Edward Burne-Jones.” She further cites a 1912 German stained glass publication that “refers to George Boos’s ‘modern’ aesthetic, characterized by many small pieces of glass in a dense network of leads, suggesting the studio’s interpretation of the Neo-Gothic.” While Boos glass in Philadelphia is “more conservative, and in keeping with the techniques of the Munich pictorial style: relatively large pieces of glass and minimal emphasis on the leads” she also observes that “much of [the firm’s] work . . . is particularly notable for its emotionally charged, non-idealized depictions of the sacred stories [and] lacks the Raphaelesque sweetness so typical of the Munich style.”

    Between 1910 and 1912 Leo designed over 60 stained glass windows made in Germany by the Boos firm for two new Roman Catholic churches in the Diocese of Pittsburgh: St. Paul’s, Butler, dedicated September 10, 1911, and St. George’s, Pittsburgh, dedicated July 7, 1912.

    St. Paul’s, Butler, was designed by John T. Comes (1873-1922), one of Pittsburgh’s leading Roman Catholic church architects. It was the almost certainly Comes, who described St. Paul’s windows as:

    the realization of old ideals worked out with modern means…. The windows were made by the firm of George Boos in Munich, and to Leo Thomas a nephew of Mr. Boos is due all credit for their beauty of color and design. Messrs. Boos and Thomas have been comparatively unknown in this country heretofore, but it is safe to say that work like that which we are considering will soon win for them an international reputation.

    The chancel window and an angel from the tracery of the transept windows at St. Paul’s, and two of the twelve nave windows at St. George’s (now St. John Vianney Parish) are illustrated. The windows exhibit a stylized two dimensionality, with backgrounds and ornamental sections composed of “many small pieces of glass in a dense network of leads.” In these windows, the flat, heavily leaded neo-medieval meets the abstract to create strikingly “modern” images, akin to the work of contemporary Secessionist designers in Austria and Hungary.

    Comes described St. Paul’s as English Gothic and designed all the furnishings. The chancel was painted by the Christian Art Guild of Pittsburgh. The metalware was made by the St. Dunstan’s Guild of the Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston, and the Birmingham [England] Guild of Handicraft.

    St. George’s Church is located in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood—The Pittsburgh Catholic called the building “an adaptation of the German Romanesque style to suit modern needs”—was designed by Herman J. Lang (born c. 1885), a native of Hesse, Germany, who came to Pittsburgh in 1901 to join his brother, Edmund (1875-1955), in the architectural firm of Edmund B. Lang & Brother. The brothers designed Roman Catholic churches in Pittsburgh together through 1910 and separately thereafter. Edmund moved to Los Angeles after 1918; Herman Lang maintained his office in suburban Carrick where he lived with his wife and three sons, and where his best-known church building, St. Basil, is located.

    Sources: John T. Comes, et al., A Notable Work of Christian Art: St. Paul’s Church Butler Pa., Dedicated Sept. 10 MCMXI. “Solemn Dedication, Grand Diocesan Event: St. George’s Church Allentown,” The Pittsburgh Catholic, 6 June 1912. John T. Comes, Catholic Art and Architecture (Pittsburgh 1920). Jean Farnsworth, et al., Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia (Philadelphia 2002), 135, 152-153, 180, 196, 354-355, 381, 395, 427-428. Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival (University Park, Pa., 2003): 75, 84-91. Elgin Vaassen, Bilder Auf Glass (Munich/Berlin 1997), 257-258, 350. Thanks to Jean Farnsworth, Gail Campbell, Diocesan Archivist Burris Esplen, Dr. Elgin van Treeck-Vaassen, and Leo Thomas’ granddaughter, Barbara Deeken.

    Illustrations

    1. St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Butler, Pa.
    2. Chancel window
    3. Tracery angel, transept window
    4. St. George’s Roman Catholic Church, Pittsburgh, Pa
    5. “Tu Es Petrus”
    6. St. George

    St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Butler, Pa.

    Chancel window

    Tracery angel, transept window

    St. George’s Roman Catholic Church, Pittsburgh, Pa

    “Tu Es Petrus”

    St. George

  5. Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast (1845-1912), New York

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast (1845-1912), New York: Urania, 1903, Allegheny Observatory; T. E. Billquist, architect

    Photographs and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    The Allegheny Observatory, established in 1859 and given in 1867 to Western University of Pennsylvania (later the University of Pittsburgh), hired architect T. E. Billquist to design a new building on a more advantageous site in 1899. Billquist’s American Renaissance observatory is a scientific acropolis—a tan brick and white terra cotta hill-top temple whose Classical forms and decoration symbolize the unity of art and science. At the core of the building is a small rotunda, housing an opalescent glass window depicting Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy.

    Director Frank L. O. Wadsworth, of the observatory of the Western University of Pennsylvania, announced last evening the arrival of a stained glass window from New York as the gift of the Misses Smith, who have devoted a generous sum to the establishment of the observatory. Prof. Wadsworth says the window is to adorn the new structure of the observatory. It is pronounced one of the most artistic works of Miss Mary E. Tillinghast.

    The window, which is 9 x 3 feet, shows Urania, almost lifelike, standing in an open porch. Her garb is of the ancient Grecian fashion; in one hand she holds a planet, the other being raised to the heavens. Beside her resting against a pedestal is a pair of compasses; on the pedestal is the lamp of knowledge, whose flames lighten the figure. She stands between two columns. Around one is a wreath of laurel.

    Far behind her, in the moonlight, are the ruins of the Acropolis. Shining in the sky and placed relatively with astronomical precision are the moon, the evening star, planets of Pleiades. Under the figure is a delicately blended spectrum, typifying the work of the observatory.

    Pittsburgh Post, 3 July 1903

    The donors were well-to-do philanthropic siblings, Jane Smith (1832-1911) and her sister Matilda (1837-1909), enthusiastic supporters of the University. The artist was Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast (1845-1912) of New York City. Like many American artists of the period, she spent several years in Europe, visiting Italy and studying painting in Paris. One of her teachers, Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, also taught the most famous American painter of the era, John Singer Sargent.

    In 1878 Tillinghast began a seven-year affiliation with New York artist John La Farge (1835-1910)—painter, muralist, critic, and inventor of a new process for making decorative glass windows. Tillinghast became an expert textile designer, served as manager of the La Farge Decorative Art Company, and learned the art of designing and making windows from La Farge.

    La Farge patented his opalescent window glass in 1880: “The object of my invention is to obtain opalescent and iridescent effects in glass windows . . . softening the light, and, by reason of its unevenness of structure and formation [prevent] the direct passage of rays of light.” La Farge claimed that his glass had the “great advantage as to realistic representation of natural objects.” This new glass was known at the time as “American Glass.” Barbara Weinberg notes that La Farge developed it in order to “reconcile the color and brilliance of early glass with contemporary desires for naturalistic form . . . , to permit depiction of rounded forms and convincing space.” American Renaissance painters admired the spatial realism introduced by Raphael and 15th-century Renaissance painters, and sought to emulate it—in paintings and in glass windows.

    Tillinghast’s first major window, Jacob’s Dream, was installed in 1887 in Grace Episcopal Church, New York City. She worked from her Greenwich Village studio, primarily as a window designer, but she also designed furniture and, in one case, was architect, decorator, and glass artist for a private chapel. Her glass was exhibited and won gold medals at several World’s Fairs. In addition to church windows, she designed windows for residences, and for institutions, most notably Urania in Pittsburgh and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1908) in the New York Historical Society.

    The year before Tillinghast’s Urania was installed in the Observatory, Fortune by La Farge was installed in D. H. Burnham’s Frick Building in downtown Pittsburgh; both windows portray female figures framed by Classical columns—decorative art echoing the Classical architecture of the building.

    The Allegheny Observatory was the first major Pittsburgh building by Thorsten E. Billquist (1867-1923). Billquist was born in Sweden and studied at the University of Gothenburg. He arrived in the United States in 1887 and appeared in Pittsburgh in 1893. Little is known about his activities during this six-year period, but he is said to have worked on the Boston Public Library for McKim, Mead & White, the firm most closely identified with the American Renaissance. In Pittsburgh, Billquist spent a year as a draftsman with Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, then another year in the office of W. Ross Proctor, an early graduate of Columbia University’s Beaux-Arts-derived curriculum. He practiced from 1897 to 1923; from 1905 to 1909 in partnership with Edward B. Lee, who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Billquist is best known for elegant Colonial Revival and Neo-Classical residences in Pittsburgh’s East End.

    Sources: “Window for Western Observatory,” Pittsburgh Post, 3 July 1903. “Woman Stained Glass Artist: Mary Tillinghast’s Work in Pittsburgh and Other Cities.” Pittsburgh Post, 15 July 1906. H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge and the Invention of American Opalescent Windows,” Stained Glass 67 (Autumn 1972): 4-11; and “The Early Stained Glass Work of John La Farge (1835-1910),” Stained Glass 67 (Summer 1972): 4-16. L. A. Richards, “An Unworthy Obscurity,” Stained Glass 89 (Spring 1994): 35-41, 51-52. Albert M. Tannler, “‘Temple of the Skies’: Observatory Hill Renaissance of Art and Science,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Focus 30:15 (February 13, 2005): 8-10.

    Illustrations

    1. Allegheny Observatory
    2. Urania

    Allegheny Observatory

    Urania

  6. Henry Hunt (1867-1951)

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Henry Hunt (1867-1951) for Leake & Greene (1889-1906), Pittsburgh: Window, 1895-96, Hawthorne Avenue Presbyterian Church, Crafton, Pa.; Boyd & Long, architects

    Photographs and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    Peripatetic in arrival and swift and enigmatic in departure best characterizes the firm of Leake & Greene. Theodore H. Leake (b. 1859) was working as a “draughtsman” in Boston 1886 through 1888; in 1889 he and George Greene (1862-1935) established the decorating firm of Leake & Greene at 78 Boylston Street. Neither apparently had training in stained glass (both list their occupation during the next decade as interior decorators) and they soon hired glass artist Henry Hunt (1867-1951), recently arrived from London, who had learned the glass craft from his father.

    In 1890 we find the firm in Pittsburgh; in 1891, Leake & Greene are back in Boston and advertising their services as “stained glass and decorators.” In 1893 the firm returned to Pittsburgh and the partners commissioned a house on Church Lane in suburban Shields (now a part of Edgeworth, Pa., along the Ohio River) attributed to Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, an architectural firm founded in 1886 with offices in Boston and Pittsburgh. It is likely—albeit educated speculation—that the decorators knew the architects and through them discovered Pittsburgh. (Longfellow, Alden & Harlow affably dissolved itself in 1896 with Alexander Longfellow taking over the Boston work while Frank Alden and Alfred Harlow remained in Pittsburgh.)

    Leake & Greene’s earliest documented surviving windows are in Hawthorne Avenue Presbyterian Church, which opened in 1896 in Crafton, Pa., four miles southwest of Pittsburgh. The windows, commissioned August 3, 1895, are simple yet colorful windows, with floral decoration and Gothic columns framing a cross-and-crown motif. Such simplicity is often found in Presbyterian church windows of that period. Intriguingly, the Hawthorne windows resemble to a degree the aisle windows in H. H. Richardson’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church (1884-86), which probably date from the 1890s. Frank Alden supervised construction of Emmanuel and designed its parish house in 1887. In 1897, Alden & Harlow added three bathrooms to Henry Clay Frick’s home Clayton and two buildings on the grounds. Leake & Greene designed the glass.

    Emmanuel Church is the site of Henry Hunt’s finest known work for Leake & Greene, the Thaw Memorial reredos of 1898, an Italian Romanesque tour-de-force in glass mosaic, with decorative metal and stonework supplied by Richardson’s master carver, John Evans of Boston. The cartoon was exhibited at the first architectural exhibition held in Pittsburgh in 1898, and a section, “Adoring Angels,” illustrated in the catalog. Leake & Greene also exhibited five other Pittsburgh projects, including a stair window for Alden & Harlow’s Jennings residence and a nave window (not executed) for the Church of the Ascension, designed by the late William Halsey Wood, but constructed by Alden & Harlow.

    Leake & Greene did not participate in the next two architectural exhibitions, but they were a strong presence in the third exhibition, held in 1905. In addition to windows for Alden & Harlow’s Armstrong residence and the chapel at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Pittsburgh (both gone) and Trinity Episcopal Church, Bellevue, Pa. (current status unknown), the majority of the commissions were for sites in New York state.

    The firm is last listed in Pittsburgh city directories in 1906. That year Hunt established his own firm (still in business as Hunt Stained Glass Studios). Leake & Greene exhibited glass at the Architectural League of New York, February 4-24, 1906, but their entry, “St. John and St. Paul,” was designed by New York artist Tabor Sears. The firm’s last documented Pittsburgh commission, awarded February 8, 1906, was the glass in Greenstone United Methodist Church, Avalon, Pa., designed by architects Vrydaugh & Wolfe.

    By 1910 Greene had married and listed his occupation as stained glass artist. Leake still called himself a decorator. For a time, Leake and George and Leonora Greene shared the Church Lane residence. Leake drops from view and Greene continued to work in stained glass; in 1923 he designed a window for the Homewood Cemetery chapel, fabricated by Rudy Brothers. Green (he dropped the “e”) was living on Church Lane, sans wife, at the time of his death in 1935.

    Nothing is currently known about A. C. Boyd and J. A. Long, the architects of Hawthorne Presbyterian Church. They only appear in the 1895 Pittsburgh city directory.

    Sources: Hawthorne Presbyterian Church of Crafton, Pa., Minutes, Inception 1894-May 1901. “George Green.” [sic] Sewickley Herald, 13 December 1935. Henry Hunt, “The Autobiography of Henry Hunt,” Stained Glass 36 (Winter 1941): 118-122. Albert M. Tannler, “A Visit to Boston,” PHLF News 163 (February 2003): 14-15. Information and documentation from Marilyn Evert, Homewood Cemetery. Additional information from Mary Beth Pastorius and Kirk Weaver.

    Illustrations:

    1. Hawthorne Presbyterian Church, Crafton, Pa.
    2. Hawthorne window
    3. Aisle windows, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, dates unknown; attributed to Leake & Greene
    4. “Adoring Angels,” Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 1898 (detail)

    Hawthorne Presbyterian Church, Crafton, Pa.

    Hawthorne window

    Aisle windows, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, dates unknown; attributed to Leake & Greene

    “Adoring Angels,” Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 1898 (detail)

  7. Ludwig Grosse (1862-1917), Pittsburgh

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Ludwig Grosse (1862-1917), Pittsburgh: Robert S. Johnston Memorial, 1892, Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Hazelwood; William Halsey Wood, architect

    Photographs and text copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

    Most of the finer productions in stained and mosaic glass used in this country were imported from Europe, principally from Munich and other cities in Bavaria. Of late years, however, notable progress has been made in this branch of art in the United States, until a high degree of excellence has been reached.

    “The L. Grosse Art Glass Co.”
    History and Commerce of Pittsburgh and Environs (1894)

    Ludwig Grosse is remembered, if at all, for bringing William Willet to Pittsburgh in 1897; Willet served as art director of Grosse’s firm 1897-98, before establishing his own studio here in 1899. While researching Willet’s career, Joan Gaul found that Ludwig Grosse was born in 1862 in Munich, Germany, attended the Munich Academy, arrived in Pittsburgh in 1888, and died in 1917.

    An 1894 description of Grosse’s firm in a commercial directory and listings and advertisements in city directories give us glimpses of Grosse’s activities in Pittsburgh. He established himself as “an artist in stained glass” in 1889, worked for the prominent Pittsburgh glass firm of S. S. Marshall & Brothers in 1890, acquired their downtown facility and opened The L. Grosse Art Glass Company there in 1891; the company continued under his name through 1898. In 1899 and 1900 he is listed as a dealer in “art works.” Grosse appears to have left Pittsburgh thereafter.

    The list of Grosse’s stained glass commissions in the 1894 commercial directory is invaluable: Four windows for St. Paul’s Cathedral (designed by Charles Bartberger, trained in Germany like many Civil War-era architects in Pittsburgh); mausoleum windows for the McCune and Pollard families; and residential glass for Thomas Jenkins in Allegheny City and S. S. Bloch in Wheeling, West Virginia. Old St. Paul’s and the Jenkins residence are gone, and I have been reliably informed that the mausoleums are not in the Allegheny or Homewood Cemeteries. There are other cemeteries to be explored, as is the house in Wheeling, but no extant glass by Ludwig Grosse in Pittsburgh had been found—until I read in The Bulletin, October 29, 1892:

    The dedicatory services of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Hazelwood . . . will take place tomorrow morning . . . . The inside is beautifully frescoed and the windows, made from designs by Mr. Ludwig Grosse, of this city, are both handsome and artistic. One of them is the gift of Mrs. Simon Johnston in memory of her son whose death occurred less than a year ago.

    The clue came, as have so many, from the work of the late James D. Van Trump, Pittsburgh’s preeminent architectural historian and Landmarks’ co-founder. Jamie created an index to articles pertaining to architecture that appeared in The Bulletin from 1887 to 1927. His notation, “Windows by Ludwig Grosse of Pittsburgh,” sent me to The Bulletin article and the identification of the Johnston Memorial. (This discovery was the impetus for scanning Jamie’s index to create a finding aid to The Bulletin now available in the Landmarks Library.)

    Ludwig Grosse was trained in Munich, a center for the production of stained glass and religious decorative art, supported by Ludwig I and shaped aesthetically by an association of German artists, The Brotherhood of St. Luke. These artists, also known as “the Nazarenes,” were inspired by early Renaissance portraiture. Sarah Brown writes in Stained Glass (1992): “The work of the Nazarenes was characterized by a religious idealism combined with a style derived from that of Dürer, Raphael, and Perugino.” When Grosse arrived in Pittsburgh in 1888, he found a kindred artistic environment. Although American glass artists were using a new material—opalescent window glass, invented by American painter John La Farge, that was made by blending opaline (milk glass) with molten colored glasses—and not the traditional hand-blown antique glass used elsewhere, the prevailing aesthetic in the United States favored glass windows imbued with the idealized naturalism found in Renaissance paintings.

    The Johnston Memorial uses American opalescent glass in a manner that both American and German glass makers of the time would have found congenial. It is the only window known to be by Grosse, pending further documentation. (The Mary Burgwin Memorial chancel window, the Hill Burgwin Memorial in what is now the Baptistery, and a damaged window after Holman Hunt’s Light of the World might be his work as well.)

    The Church of the Good Shepherd, Hazelwood (1891-92), ranks among Pittsburgh’s most significant church buildings. It is the second of three buildings in metropolitan Pittsburgh designed by William Halsey Wood of Newark, New Jersey (1855-1897), an architect of great promise—Ralph Adams Cram called him “a man of genius”—who died at the age of 41. Wood also designed the Carnegie Library in Braddock, 1888; and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, 1896, noteworthy for glass by Healy & Millet of Chicago and furnishings and decoration by J. & R. Lamb Studios of New York.

    Sources: The Bulletin 25, 29 October 1892: 19. History and Commerce of Pittsburgh and Environs (New York 1894): 83, 219. Pittsburgh city directories 1889-1900. Sarah Brown, Stained Glass: An Illustrated History (London 1992): 134. Joan Gaul, “Pittsburgh 1893-1912: Five Artists,” The Journal of Stained Glass 28 (2004): 49. Thanks to David J. Vater and Sue Weigand of Wheeling, WV,  for research assistance.

    Illustrations

    1. Church of the Good Shepherd – exterior
    2. Church of the Good Shepherd – interior
    3. Robert S. Johnston Memorial

    Church of the Good Shepherd – exterior

    Church of the Good Shepherd – interior

    Robert S. Johnston Memorial

  8. Alfred Godwin (1850-1934), Philadelphia

    Series 1 | Bibiliography

    Alfred Godwin (1850-1934), Philadelphia: Harvest window, 1883?/1892 and
    Library window 1892, Clayton, Henry Clay Frick residence; Andrew W.
    Peebles (1882) and F. J. Osterling (1890-92), renovation architects

    Text and photograph of Library window copyright © 2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. Photograph of Clayton © 1998 William Rydberg PHOTON for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. Photograph of Harvest by Pytlik Design Associates copyright © 2006 Frick Art & Historical Center.

    In 1882 Henry Clay Frick purchased Homewood, an Italianate house in Pittsburgh’s East End. He hired Pittsburgh architect Andrew W. Peebles to supervise extensive remodeling, and D. S. Hess & Company of New York provided fashionable furniture and interior appointments. Eighteen ornamental glass windows designed and made by Alfred Godwin & Company of Philadelphia were installed in 1883: the principal window in the stairway landing, Love in the Tower; transom windows; vestibule door windows; parlor and library windows containing figures and landscapes; and a “Window Rear Hall (with figure).” Jean Farnsworth tells us that Godwin, of Manchester, England, arrived in Philadelphia in 1870. By 1882 he had established his own glass firm, and although he closed his shop in 1916 he remained active in Philadelphia well into the 1930s.

    In 1890 Frick hired Pittsburgh architect Frederick J. Osterling to transform the house into a grand French château, Clayton. The enlargement/renovation was completed in 1892. Some of Godwin’s 1883 glass was retained and remounted in the remodeled interior. The figure window, Harvest, made of hand-blown (known as “antique”) and enamel-painted glass may be the window originally located in the rear hall; it received an opalescent frame. A letter of January 2, 1892, from Frick’s secretary, George Megrew, to Godwin notes that Godwin had “not sent the glass panel called ‘Harvest’ for the sliding door. Please let me know about it immediately.” A work order dated January 22, 1892, noted “ornamental work ordered added to figure for sliding door in hall”; the work was approved by F. J. Osterling on January 25, 1892.

    Frick’s great-granddaughter Martha Sanger describes Harvest:

    For the door between the entrance hall and kitchen quarters, A. Godwin & Company of Philadelphia, known for using semiprecious stones in stained-glass windows, provided a small golden-hued panel framed in moonstones that depicts a woman dressed in blue, holding an overflowing cornucopia.

    Godwin also provided bathroom windows for Mrs. Frick and her sister Martha Childs and four three-light glue-chip or “crystalline” windows for the Library.

    The Pittsburgh firm of Leake & Greene provided the opalescent glass dome and ornamental cabinet doors in Mr. Frick’s new bathroom of 1897, designed by Alden & Harlow. Godwin’s Love in the Tower was removed from the stairway (only two panels have survived and may be seen in the Frick Art Museum) when Cottier & Company of New York redecorated the house in 1903-04 and installed an antique glass Cottier window, The Four Virgins.

    Windows by Alfred Godwin in Pittsburgh are especially noteworthy since Godwin played a significant part in the training of two of Pittsburgh’s leading glass artists. According to Joan Gaul, J. Horace Rudy (1870-1940) was an apprentice in Godwin’s firm 1891-1892; the period that the Clayton windows were reinstalled. In 1893, Rudy, his parents and his brothers, arrived in Pittsburgh and established Rudy Brothers Company. Rudy is important, not only for the high quality of his own work, but for his training of some of the most important American glass craftsmen of the next generation, notably Charles J. Connick (1875-1945), George W. Sotter (1879-1953) and his wife, Alice Bennet Sotter (1883-1967), and Lawrence B. Saint (1885-1961). Before William Willet (1867-1921) moved to Pittsburgh to join The L. Grosse Art Glass Company, he worked for Godwin c.1894-96. Willet’s work helped reshape the approach of the next generation of American glass artists to the glass craft in this country.

    Sources: Alfred Godwin catalogues, c. 1883, c. 1890, and 1895, Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the Rakow Library, Corning, New York. “Alfred Godwin,” Stained Glass 29 (Spring/Summer 1934): 54. Helene Weis, “Some Notes on Early Philadelphia Stained Glass,” Stained Glass 71 (Spring 1976): 24-27. Jean Farnsworth, “Biographical Sketches of Stained-Glass Studios and Selected Artists,” Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia (Philadelphia 2002): 435-436, 456. www.philadelphiabuildings.org. Information and documentation from Robin Pflasterer, Frick Art & Historical Center. Helen Clay Frick Foundation-Henry Clay Frick Papers, Frick Art Reference Library, New York. Clayton: The Pittsburgh Home of Henry Clay Frick; Art and Furnishings (Pittsburgh 1988). Martha Frick Symington Sanger, The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture, Interiors, Landscapes in the Golden Era (New York 2001): 22. 28. Joan Gaul, “Pittsburgh 1893-1912: Five Artists,” The Journal of Stained Glass 28 (2004): 47. Special thanks to Rona H. Moody and Nicholas Parrendo.

    Illustrations:

    1. “Clayton” (1998)
    2. Harvest
    3. Library windows

    “Clayton” (1998)

    Harvest

    Library windows

Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

100 West Station Square Drive, Suite 450

Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Phone: 412-471-5808  |  Fax: 412-471-1633