Museum Accessions - Westmoreland Museum acquires Tiffany window - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

About 1905 Thomas Lynch (1854-1914), the general manager since 1891 of the Henry C. Frick Coke Company in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, decided to build a grand new residence on West Pittsburgh Street in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. To light the staircase landing, he commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to create the stained-glass window illustrated here, which, most fittingly, has recently been returned to Greensburg, having been acquired by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art there. It is the museum's only work by Tiffany.

In a deviation from his more usual practice, Tiffany accommodated Lynch's desire to incorporate a specific view in the window, portraying the thatched-roof farmhouse in Ballyduff, county Waterford, Ireland, where Lynch's father, Patrick, had been born and from which his grandfather had brought the family to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in the 1850s. A period photograph of the house confirms that Tiffany rendered it faithfully in the stained-glass window, even down to the flowers in the window boxes.

The window remained in the Greensburg house for some forty years while the house was successively occupied by Thomas Lynch and by his wife into widowhood, and finally by their son Thomas Lynch Jr. Having no children, Thomas Lynch Jr. and his wife sold the house to Colonel W John Stiteler Jr., who removed the window to his country house in Rockwood, Pennsylvania. From thence the window eventually came to auction at Christie's, to be bought by the Westmoreland Museum, of which Thomas Lynch was a founding trustee.

The museum has installed the window in a new wall, backlighted to enhance the brilliance of the splendidly executed landscape, which was achieved with multiple plating layers of colored glass, tinted in subtle gradations to suggest the distant mountains and sky. In addition, the glass is acid-etched in some places to suggest dusk, the time of day the artist was attempting to reproduce.

The flask illustrated at the right was designed by Emile Auguste Reiber, an artist who became the director of the large French silver firm of Christofle. It was made about 1873 by Joseph Theodore Deck, one of the outstanding French ceramic artists of his time, who began his career in a stove factory in Strasbourg. He set up a pottery in Paris in 1856 and five years later, after considerable experimentation, produced a turquoise glaze that came to be known as bleu de Deck, or Deck blue. In the 1870s he became one of the pioneers of the vogue for Japanese design, favoring naturalistic decorations in bright colors, as is evident in the flask shown here, He later became the administrator of the Sevres porcelain factory and is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, appropriately under a ceramic monument.