An impressionistic stained-glass window by Tiffany Studios sold at Sotheby’s New York on November 18 for $12.4 million, making it the most valuable work made by the early 20th-century decorative arts company ever sold at auction.
Commissioned in 1913 as a window for the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio, the Danner Memorial Window (named for John and Terressa Danner, who were founding members of the church) easily passed its presale estimate of $5 million and $7 million. The previous record for a Tiffany Studios work was $1.9 million that the seller Alan Gerry paid for the piece at Christie’s in 2000.
Three individuals bid for the work over a six-and-a-half-minute period before the hammer fell to a client bidding via telephone with Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and pop culture.
The sale was notable not simply for its high price, but for its place at a fine art evening sale. This was the first time a major Tiffany work had appeared alongside the likes of Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Leonora Carrington in one of the auction house’s most prestigious slots. In light of this success, it will likely happen again. It represents “a landmark moment for the Tiffany market,” said Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s head of 20th-century design, one that clearly establishes “Tiffany within the pantheon of the most iconic artists of the twentieth century.”
Tiffany Studios’ stained-glass The Danner Memorial Window is on display during a media preview at Sotheby’s in New York, on November 8, 2024. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.
The Danner Memorial Window was designed by Agnes Northrup, a Queens, New York, native who defied societal expectations by forgoing marriage and family to devote herself to her career at the design firm (Louis Comfort Tiffany did not retain married women). After studying at the Flushing Institute, Northrup joined the company in the 1880s, choosing and cutting glass as a so-called Tiffany Girl. Within a decade, she’d been given her own studio and her landscape and garden designs would become intertwined with Tiffany’s aesthetic.
By the time of the Ohio window’s commission, Tiffany was world-renowned for its innovative stained-glass techniques and luscious designs. The window’s composition is one that was favored by Tiffany Studios for its memorial pieces—trees standing around a meandering river that leads onto a mountainous valley. It was thought an elegant metaphor for the journey of life and one Northup had helped develop, as she did for the 1903 window she designed for her father at the Reformed Church of Flushing. In the Danner Memorial Window, Northup lays a sweep of poppies at the feet of trees heavy with fruit and casts a sky that is bruised and glowing. It’s a serene vision of fleeting beauty.
“Tiffany and Northrop were leveraging the qualities of their own Favrile glass to achieve the same painterly effects of light as the great impressionist painters of their time,” Pollack said. “One could say they were painting in glass.”