Sept. 7, 2019-Mar. 22, 2020: “Eternal Light: The Sacred Stained-Glass Windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany” at the Driehaus Museum (Chicago)

The White City was full of color, and an exhibition at the Driehaus Museum in Chicago showcases some stunning examples of luminous stained glass and ornate metal work from the 1893 World’s Fair. “Eternal Light: The Sacred Stained-Glass Windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany” features the design and production of ecclesiastical window commissions for the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.

Among the treasures that still exist from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the “Tiffany Chapel” must be counted among the most beautiful. Louis Comfort Tiffany earned international acclaim for the chapel interior he designed inside his father’s Tiffany & Co. pavilion in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. After almost succumbing to neglect and damage, the ornate chapel was restored and installed in the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, in 1999.

“Eternal Light” features select items from, and relating to, the Tiffany Chapel in the second section of the exhibition, titled “Tiffany and the Chicago World’s Fair.” The Museum aims to highlight “the marketing genius of Louis Comfort Tiffany and, in particular, the firm’s successful efforts to promote its services to Christian congregations and their patrons.”

A video documenting the history of the Tiffany Chapel and its reconstruction at the Morse Museum runs continuously in a small room preceding this section.

The first room showcases the Antependium Window (c. 1892-93), a leaded glass panel depicting a green opalescent cruciform with Celtic designs on a striking crimson field. The glass work is based on a frontal cloth that Tiffany designed to hang over the lectern in the chapel displayed at the Fair. Accompanying the window are a photograph of the cloth (now lost) and a chromolithographic print of a painting of the chapel by Joseph Lauber, published in Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The Book of the Fair.

An adjoining room houses an Altar Cross (c. 1892), commissioned for All Angel’s Church in New York and then borrowed by Tiffany for his World’s Fair exhibit. Standing four-feet high, the cross of gold is decorated with leaded, enameled, and jeweled glass. The central sun dazzles. An accompanying copy of the October 1893 issue of The Decorator and Furnisher magazine describes the Tiffany altar cross as having “just enough metal to carry the enormous white topazes, which are set so as to scintillate light in every direction.” Tiffany later designed a new cross for the chapel alter.

Across the room sits a massive twelve-arm Benedictine Candelabrum (1893) made of bronze and molded glass, one of two on display at the 1893 World’s Fair in an ecclesiastical gallery adjacent to the chapel.

“Eternal Light” runs through March 22, 2020 at the Driehaus Museum, 40 East Erie Street in Chicago.