J&R Lamb Studios, America's oldest continuously-run decorative arts company, is famous as a stained glass maker, preceding the studios of both John LaFarge and Louis C. Tiffany. [2]
J&R Lamb Studios, America's oldest continuously-run decorative arts company, is famous as a stained glass maker, preceding the studios of both John LaFarge and Louis C. Tiffany. [2]
The J&R Lamb Studios was established in 1857 by brothers Joseph (1833–1898) and Richard Lamb (1836–1909) in Greenwich Village in New York City. Their parents, Joseph Lamb (1806-1840) and Elizabeth Clark (1809-1838) were married on October 1, 1832, in Orpington, Kent, England. Elizabeth Clark Lamb died on April 7, 1838, during a difficult childbirth in which the infant was stillborn. The young brothers left Lewisham, England, at some point in 1840 to come to the United States with their father, a landscape architect, who had been engaged to work on Niblo's Garden, an exhibition hall and open-air theater. [2] [3] During the voyage, their father died, and a sympathetic Scottish couple, Peter Rennie (1805-1870) and Agnes Rennie (1809-1894), who were also making the journey to America, took on the responsibility of caring for these two young boys and became their foster parents. The boys grew up in the Rennie home at Dobbs Ferry, New York. As a young man in the early 1850s, Joseph was active in literary and poetic circles in New York City and was a member of the Irving Literary Union, founded in New York City in 1852 in honor of the great author, Washington Irving (1783-1859). Joseph was enthusiastic about the Gothic Revival movement. That enthusiasm may have come about as the result of exposure to the efforts and literature of the New York Ecclesiological Society. For a time, Joseph Lamb considered entering the ministry or becoming a church musician. However, as his talent lay elsewhere, he decided it was better "to make the art of the church his life's work." [4]
Originally, the company also did mosaic, murals, monuments, and other work for churches, temples, residences, government and academic institutions.
The firm was chosen by the United States government as one of four studios to represent American achievements in stained glass at the Paris International Exposition of 1900. They won two prizes for their window entitled Religion Enthroned designed by Frederick Stymetz Lamb (1862–1928), the third of Joseph's sons. [1] [3] Frederick's brother, Charles Rollinson Lamb (1860-1942), a renowned City Beautiful theorist and architect, shaped the studio's aesthetic and intellectual character and business. [2] Frederick became its head of design and supervised the firm's team of skilled craftsman. [5] In the early 1920s Frederick and his wife Nellie moved to Berkeley, California where he supervised local civic projects and frequently exhibited his landscapes in oil to great acclaim at the art colonies in Berkeley and Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. [6]
Ella Condie Lamb, the wife of Charles Rollinson Lamb, was a well known artist and stained glass designer, also winning a medal in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 for her oil work, "The Advent Angel". [7] [8]
Studio owner and family member, Karl Barre Lamb (1890–1969), was president of the Stained Glass Association of America 1954–1955 and an elected fellow. [9] Lamb descendants ran the studios until his death. [2] Under Karl B. Lamb's leadership, the studios relocated to Tenafly, New Jersey after the Great Depression. [3]
In 1970, Lamb Studios artist Donald Samick bought the firm. [2]
With the death of the stained glass artist Katharine Lamb Tait (1895–1981), the daughter of Charles Rollinson Lamb, the Lamb family was no longer involved with the studio. [10]
The Library of Congress is the repository for the Lamb Studios Archive. [2] [11]
Cf. Lamb Studios Archive: Background, Library of Congress
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is associated with the art nouveau and aesthetic art movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Stained glass is coloured glass as a material or works created from it. Although traditionally made in flat panels and used as windows, the creations of modern stained glass artists also include three-dimensional structures and sculpture. Modern vernacular usage has often extended the term "stained glass" to include domestic lead light and objets d'art created from foil glasswork exemplified in the famous lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
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John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Tiffany glass refers to the many and varied types of glass developed and produced from 1878 to 1929-1930 at the Tiffany Studios in New York City, by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a team of other designers, including Clara Driscoll, Agnes F. Northrop, and Frederick Wilson.
Charles Rollinson Lamb was an American architect and sculptor.
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Charles Jay Connick (1875–1945) was a prominent American painter, muralist, and designer best known for his work in stained glass in the Gothic Revival style. Born in Springboro, Pennsylvania, Connick eventually settled in the Boston area where he opened his studio in 1913. Connick's work is contained in many preeminent churches and chapels, including examples in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. He also authored the book Adventures in Light and Color in 1937. Connick's studio continued to operate, and remained a leading producer of stained glass, until 1986.
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Katharine Lamb Tait was an American stained glass and mosaics designer, painter, muralist, and illustrator. She was the head designer at J&R Lamb Studios for more than four decades, and created notable commissions for the Tuskegee Institute Chapel and for chapels at the United States Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, among others.
Helen Maitland Armstrong was an American stained glass artist who worked both solo and in partnership with her father, Maitland Armstrong. Her work is considered among the finest produced in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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