Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast (1845 - December 15, 1912) [1] was an American artist. Best known for stained glass, her professional career encompassed roles as architect, muralist, mosaic artist, textile artist, inventor, writer, and studio boss.
Tillinghast trained in Paris, then embarked on a commercial career in the decorative arts studios of 1880s New York City. Her early career was marked with successes despite a chaotic business relationship with John La Farge that ended in years of public litigation. Once independent, from the mid-1880s until her death in 1912, Tillinghast continued to produce major stained glass commissions while also running a stable, successful decorative arts business, working from a well-known studio in Greenwich Village.
Tillinghast was born in New York in 1845, the daughter of the wealthy merchant and land speculator Philip Tillinghast (1808-1879) and his wife Julia Anne Cozzens Titus. The family moved from Manhattan to Clinton Hill, Newark in the 1850s, where a street bears the family name. She was taught privately, and traveled with her father to Europe. From 1872 to 1878 she studied painting in Paris, under Carolus-Duran and others.
Her father Philip was ruined in the financial panic of 1873, and died in 1879. While the family retained some means and its social connections, Mary made a vocation for herself out of her art training. Within a few years, from 1878 to 1884, she got direct experience in the flourishing decorative arts studios of the time, in both the Tiffany camp and La Farge camp.
In February 1881 Tillinghast became an employee of pioneering interior designer Candace Wheeler, at that time of Tiffany & Wheeler. For all of Wheeler's professional support of other women, the job lasted only until mid-July, then within months she and Tillinghast had a legal dispute in 1881–82 over a patented tapestry stitch. Wheeler considered Tillinghast's patent application for a "Needle-Woven Tapestry" stolen from her studios, and filed suit. [2] Ultimately the two patent applications were found to be non-conflicting, and the suit dismissed. Tillinghast's patent was granted November 8, 1882. (Her address was given as West Orange, New Jersey.) [3]
By that time, Tillinghast had already left Wheeler's employment, gone to work for John La Farge, become head of his embroidery department, and went to work within his legendary decorative arts and stained glass design studios. From La Farge she learned the art of designing and making windows, [4] along with the benefit of access to his craftsmen. During her tenure the firm landed part of the plum commission for The Union League Club in 1881. In October 1882 she embarked with him as equal partners in a business entity called "John La Farge and Tillinghast", an attempt to deliver years of backlog, re-order the firm's finances, and preserve its client list. This lasted a year, with little success. Its successor was the La Farge Decorative Art Company, recapitalized and headed by George A. Chamberlain, the man who became La Farge's virtual nemesis in the ensuing years of litigation over the company's artistic assets. [5] La Farge was charged with larceny for refusing to hand over his own work, an unfortunate turn in his career. Tillinghast remained involved and became a third party in these suits, both La Farge and Chamberlain unhappy with her.
In 1883 she produced a professional coup, a commission for heavy French-blue tapestries hung as curtains in the library of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street—fabricated with a new process, attributed to her alone. Vanderbilt's well-publicized, often-mentioned fee to Tillinghast for those tapestries was $30,000. [6] In contrast La Farge had been fired by the Vanderbilts and blacklisted among their social circle. [5]
In the following years Tillinghast relocated to Washington for a year or so, executing a number of house renovations for clients including Alexander Graham Bell. She returned to Europe for further training, again with Carolus-Duran and with Jean-Jacques Henner. Once resettled back in New York City's Greenwich Village, near her family's original home, she would work from her well-known, famously unheated studios at No. 3 Washington Square North for the rest of her life. One regular patroness for stained glass artwork and other projects was the moneyed philanthropist Mrs. Russell Sage.
Tillinghast's artwork took a large variety of forms, spanning textiles, oil portraits, interior design, and at least one complete mausoleum. Her business model continued to evolve as well, into a number of directions: home decoration, with a series of advice articles for Art Interchange magazine; the creation of "Tillinghast Studios" with an evident sideline in church furnishings; and an expanded architectural practice. Even in the narrow field of stained glass, according to her obituary in the American Art Directory, "Miss Tillinghast was the first to realize the difference that the electric lighting of churches was destined to make in the spectacular effect of window designs." [7]
Mary Tillinghast was an architect and a member of the National Sculpture Society. Never married, she died at home in New York in late 1912. She is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In 1913, painter Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine, moved into the studio on the unheated top floor of No. 3 Washington Square North and lived there until May 1967. [8]
The work of Tillinghast includes:
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 the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic 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. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant religious buildings. 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.
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.
Clinton Hill is a neighborhood within the south-central portion of the city of Newark in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. It is centered at Clinton Avenue, and bounded roughly by Elizabeth Avenue in the east, Hawthorne Avenue in the south, Avon Avenue in the north, and Irvington in the west.
Candace Wheeler, often credited as the mother of interior design, was one of America's first woman interior and textile designers. She is noted for helping to open the field of interior design to women, supporting craftswomen, and for encouraging a new style of American design. She founded both the Society of Decorative Art in New York City (1877) and the New York Exchange for Women's Work (1878).
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
Tiffany glass refers to the many and varied types of glass developed and produced from 1878 to 1933 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.
Willet Hauser Architectural Glass, Inc is a North American stained glass firm located in Winona, Minnesota that specializes in the design, fabrication, preservation and restoration of leaded stained glass and faceted glass windows.
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.
Donald MacDonald (1841–1916) was a leading stained glass artisan and designer in 19th century Boston. Born Donald McDonald, he altered the spelling of his surname to "MacDonald" around 1877.
William Willet was an American portrait painter, muralist, stained glass designer, studio owner and writer. An early proponent of the Gothic Revival and active in the "Early School" of American stained glass, he founded the Willet Stained Glass and Decorating Company, a stained glass studio, with his wife and partner Anne Lee Willet, in protest against the opalescent pictorial windows which were the rage at the turn of the twentieth century.
Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) was an American stained glass artist, painter, and book cover designer. Successful at a time when few women had professional art careers, she founded her own firm, Lily Glass Works. Her stained glass windows are found in churches and colleges throughout the northeastern United States. As a member of the board of the Harvard University "Annex," she helped to found Radcliffe College.
Margaret Isobel Chilton (1875–1963), born at Clifton, Bristol, was a British stained glass artist and instructor.
Arild Rosenkrantz was a Danish nobleman painter, sculptor, stained glass artist and illustrator.
Helen Maitland Armstrong (1869–1948) 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.
Dora Wheeler Keith, also known as Mrs. Boudinot Keith, was a portrait artist, muralist, an illustrator for books and magazines, and designed tapestries for her mother Candace Wheeler's firm Associated Artists.
Clara Miller Burd was an American stained glass designer and children's book and magazine cover illustrator.
Margaret Redmond (1867–1948) was an American stained glass artist. Her work is characteristic of the medieval revival style, inspired by the fourteenth and fifteenth century stained glass of French and English cathedrals. She chose innovative glass materials, vibrant colors and thick leading designs for her windows, favored by the leading stained glass artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. She is best known for her stained glass work from the 1920s to the 1940s, which can be found in churches, museums, homes and libraries from New Jersey to Maine.
The Westminster Presbyterian Church is a historic Presbyterian church located in the Delaware Avenue neighborhood of Buffalo, Erie County, New York. The Romanesque Revival building completed in 1859 features a number of exception stained glass windows and is a contributing property to the Delaware Avenue Historic District designated in 1974.
St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo Episcopal Church, otherwise simply referred to as St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo, is an active Episcopal church in Tuxedo, New York, located within the historic village of Tuxedo Park.