and creases that remained when the glass was cooled. Schaechter instead accomplishes the fluid look of fabric by layering multiple flash glass sheets of varying color depth, reflectiveness, and opacity. What both approaches produce is the stunning ethereal quality that no other medium rivals.


“Some medieval guy said it best when he said ‘stained glass is enlightenment embodied,’” Schaechter says in her autobiographical essay “Parables in Glass,” where she also credits an atheist upbringing for her “attraction to the spiritual aspect of transmitted light.”


Impelled by the great public interest in the stained- glass windows and mural in Boston’s Trinity Church, created by his rival John LaFarge, and the increasing significance of decorative murals in the late 19th Century, Tiffany would position his studio to make thousands of windows for churches, homes, and public buildings in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia.


While the company’s process of making windows hadn’t diverted much from that of Theophilus over 800 years earlier, Tiffany had access to the selection from several glasshouses in Brooklyn. But by 1893, Tiffany Glass Furnaces in Corona (Queens) produced most of the glass in their own furnaces – and there he and his artisans had full control over both artistic and technical elements.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48