TIFFANY WINDOW

TIFFANY WINDOW

The window was commissioned by Caroline and Georgiana Willard, who also funded the tiffany interior of the Willard Chapel at Auburn Theological Seminary in honor of their parents. In a catalogue for the Tiffany Company, published in 1897, Caroline Willard commented, "The window which you have recently furnished gives me so much pleasure that I desire to order two others for the same room." Whether or not those two windows were added is unknown, as no trace of them exists.

Tiffany windows were made of Tiffany Favrile glass, which, according to the company, was made in the Tiffany furnaces and could not be duplicated by other manufacturers. It was the expert use of the glass itself as a shading agent, rather than painting on the glass surfaces, which built the Tiffany reputation. The process was described in a late-nineteenth century quote from the Philadelphia America: "The Tiffany windows are triumphs of artistic ingenuity in dealing with a stubborn material. Hard lines are softened and tones blended and modified by plating one color with another; and...the gradation of tints and modeling of forms is produced...either by varying the thickness of the glass by causing it to wrinkle as it cools or be streaking one color with another while the metal is still in a semi-fluid condition."