Cobb Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1892, Bowne Street Community Church, Photo credit: Donald Traser

 

 CELEBRATING AGNES NORTHROP, FLUSHING’S TIFFANY DESIGNER, HER STAINED GLASS WINDOWS AT THE BOWNE STREET COMMUNITY CHURCH, AND THE TIFFANY GIRLS

By Ellen M. Spindler, Bowne House Collection Volunteer

Agnes Fairchild Northrop (1857-1953) was born right here in Flushing, Queens. She worked with Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) (“Tiffany”) for over half a century and became an extremely accomplished, if not always credited, designer of stained-glass windows. She was a female pioneer in the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements and the later Art Nouveau movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a local hero, and we celebrate her life and legacy.

 

Portrait of Agnes Northrop, late 19th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Agnes was born to Emily Fairchild and Allen P. Northrop in Flushing, Queens. Her maternal grandfather, Ezra Fairchild, was a well-known educator who headed the Flushing Institute, a private boarding school for boys. Agnes’ father taught at the Flushing Institute and met her mother there so she was educated at and resided at the Flushing Institute for most of her life. As we have previously reported in an article recently published on this website, “Civic Engagement and Civil Disobedience: Samuel B. and Susan (Howland) Parsons and Robert B. and Mary (Mitchell) Parsons”, the Flushing Institute was established c.1828 and served as a private boarding school for boys for ten years. The school was moved to College Point and the name was changed to St. Ann’s Hall c.1838 and young women were instead taught there for a while. Fairchild became a principal at the school when it reverted to educating boys c.1845 and the name was restored to Flushing Institute.

Tiffany Girls on the roof of Tiffany Studios, c.1904-5, The Charles Hosmer Morse Foundation, Inc. (Agnes Northrop is on far right in rear row)

According to Metropolitan Museum curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Agnes’ memoir mentions that a friend introduced her to Tiffany in 1884. Tiffany opened his first glass houses in the late 1870s and in 1881 purchased land for his business on Fourth Avenue (Park Avenue South) and E. 25th Street in Manhattan. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated in December 1885 and later became known as Tiffany Studios. In 1893, he started another glass company, the Stourbridge Glass Company, later renamed the Tiffany Glass Furnaces and Tiffany Studios, in Corona, Queens at 43rd Avenue and 97th Place. All of the businesses remained active until 1932 when they declared bankruptcy.

The “Tiffany Girls” was the name given to the Women’s Glass Cutting Department, organized in 1892 in response to the male Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters union going on strike. Tiffany recruited the women from art schools like Cooper Union and the School of Applied Design. The Tiffany Girls selected the glass and cut it into intricate and unusual shapes. Frelinghuysen states that Agnes served as head of the Tiffany Girls for one year but did not like her managerial role. Afterward, the department was headed by Clara Driscoll (1861-1944) for a long time. Clara was also a respected designer. Although Tiffany is said to have paid the women equal wages, none of the women in the company were allowed to be employed while married in the tradition of the time. Consequently, Agnes Northrop never married. The number of women employed by Tiffany was also limited after negotiations with the male union in 1903 when they threatened another strike. The women never unionized.

Agnes became independently acknowledged as a Tiffany designer by the 1890s and had her own studio down the hall at the company so she did not work in the cutting room with the other women or with men in the studio. She was one of a few women to secure a patent for her designs. During her tenure there, most of the designs were done by men. Agnes collaborated and added flower details to important windows and was not always credited, but at least we know of several which can be directly attributed to her. These include windows installed at the Bowne Street Community Church in Flushing, Queens.

Bowne Street Community Church Exterior (left), photo credit: Capt.JayRuffins

Bowne Street Community Church Interior (right), photo credit: Stefan Dreisbach-Williams

As we have previously reported in “Civic Engagement and Civil Disobedience: Samuel B. and Susan (Howland) Parsons and Robert B. and Mary (Mitchell) Parsons”, the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church of Flushing, later known as the Bowne Street Community Church, was initially organized in 1842 and was located downtown closer to Flushing Creek. A larger church was built in 1892 at 143-11 Roosevelt Avenue, at the corner of what is now Bowne Street and Roosevelt Avenue, with “modern” windows designed by Agnes. In 1873 Miss Mary B. Parsons, the owner of the Bowne House and Farm at the time, sold the land near the Bowne House to the church on which the new building was constructed. The Reformed Church eventually merged with the First Congregational Church up the block which Robert B. Parsons had helped to found in 1851 and that building was subsequently destroyed in a fire. According to curator Frelinghuysen, Agnes’ grandfather Ezra Fairchild became pastor at the predecessor Protestant Reformed Dutch Church of Flushing in 1865 and, as a result, this became Agnes’ family church. We also know Agnes’ father served as an elder at the Reformed Church from 1864-1903.

Agnes designed several windows at the Bowne Street Community Church. The Cobb Memorial Window was installed in 1892 when the church was completed and dedicated, as well as the Byrd Memorial Window, an Ornamental Window and a Rose Window. The Cobb Memorial Window shown above the title of this article was dedicated to Oliver Ellsworth Cobb (21 Oct 1833 - 23 Sep 1891), pastor of the church from 1872-1890.

Partial view of Cobb Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1892, Bowne Street Community Church, Photo Credit: Donald Traser

 

Ornamental Window, Agnes Northrop, 1892, Bowne Street Community Church, Photo credit: Joe Keating

 
 

Rose Window, Agnes Northrop, 1892, Bowne Street Community Church, Photo credit: Joe Keating

 

Agnes also designed the Robert H. Baker Memorial Window installed in 1899 at the Bowne Street Community Church. Baker was reportedly secretary-treasurer of one of Flushing’s largest nurseries (we are researching which one).

 

Robert Baker Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1899 (outer panes may be 1892), Bowne Street Community Church, Photo credit: Joe Keating

 

In 1903 Agnes designed the Northrop Memorial Window at the Bowne Street Community Church to memorialize her father with a Voyage of Life fruit tree and heavenly city shown above.

 

Northrop Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1904, Bowne Street Community Church, Photo credit: Donald Traser

 

Partial view of Northrop Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1904, Bowne Street Community church, Photo credit: Donald Traser

The Hartwell Memorial Window shown below, now located at the Chicago Institute of Art, and the well-known Autumn Landscape Window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have also been attributed to Agnes. These are just a few of the many stained-glass windows she designed.

 

Hartwell Memorial Window, Agnes Northrop, 1917, Art Institute of Chicago

 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Agnes’ employer, was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who started the famous jewelry company Tiffany & Co. Tiffany’s early education was at a boarding school in Flushing and he may have gone to the Flushing Institute. He subsequently was educated at two military schools. He trained as a landscape painter and then took up interior design. He later built a large estate on 600 acres called Laurelton near Oyster Bay, Long Island, with a large garden which served as an inspiration for many Tiffany designs.

Tiffany, working with his English foreman and chemist Arthur J. Nash and other workers from Stourbridge, England, pioneered the production of opalescent glass and revolutionized its chromatic effect by adding minerals and metal oxides to the composition before being fired. He also created a new form of iridescent art glass he trademarked as Favrile. These technological changes were used to great effect in the leaded glass of the company’s stained-glass windows. Agnes Northrop then brought her own artistic skills to bear in designing the exquisite Tiffany windows still visible right here in Flushing.

According to Margi Hofer, Museum Director of the New York Historical Society, Tiffany believed that women’s nimble fingers were well suited to glass cutting and that “women had a better sense of color and naturalistic design” than men. Of course, equally admirable was the fact that Tiffany’s employment practices reflected that belief, with the exception of his not permitting married women to work which was common at the time and undoubtedly due, in part, to labor unrest. Labor unions had become more common in the industrial sectors in the late 1880s and coincided with a gradual post-Civil War acceptance of women in the workforce, not unlike what happened in the post-World War II period. This created tensions between male and women workers and their employers.

Tiffany was the first to solely use landscape composition as a window design, rather than just figurative or decorative ones, using stained glass as a medium. At times, this more secular approach became controversial when it came to commissions for church windows. As a Tiffany designer, Agnes Northrop emphatically declared “she did not do figures” and she became principally associated with flowers, foliage, and landscapes in Tiffany windows. She is known to have loved photography and used it to help her with her designs. She was particularly inspired by the gardens at the Flushing Institute where she lived and Kissena Brook.

Agnes Northrop, Kissena Brook (date unknown)

According to curator Frelinghuysen, the Tiffany Studio and Glass Company’s work coincided with the burgeoning garden movement of the late 19th-early 20th centuries and spirituality to be found in nature by Thoreau and other authors. It also coincided with gardens becoming a dominant theme in American paintings and Impressionism. Not coincidentally, it also coincided with Flushing’s role as a garden capital starting in the 1700s and leading up to the turn of the 20th century, during the time the Parsons and Kissena Nurseries were ongoing.

 

Kissena Nurseries Catalogue (1874)

 

We acknowledge Agnes Northrop, a female pioneer in the art of design and glass work, and local hero, and we celebrate her life and legacy. We encourage all to visit the Bowne Street Community Church when it is open to the public and enjoy her beautiful windows installed there, some dating back to more than a century ago. The Bowne Street Community Church was recently designated a New York City Landmark.

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