Tiffany Windows in Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia

Louis Comfort Tiffany began his career as a painter in the 1860\u27s, illustrating his love of color and nature through genre scenes and landscapes. Unfulfilled as a painter he established a successful interior design firm, L. C. Tiffany and Associated Artists, designing interiors for America\u27s rich and elite, all the while trying to bring his vision of beauty within their reach. He is greatest remembered by his contributions to the industry of colored glass and the development of Tiffany Studios. Inspired by the colors in the stained glass windows of the twelfth and thirteenth century and by the lack of quality glass available to American glass artisans during the close of the nineteenth century, Tiffany devoted his life to the development of new colors, textures and patterns in glass and techniques in leading of windows. His salesmanship, desire to meet the needs of his clients, as well as his reputation for being a perfectionist helped him to create colored glass windows with subjects ranging from purely decorative to religious and mythological imagery and landscapes for churches, businesses, and homes in the fifty states and many countries abroad. The cities of Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia house over fifty Tiffany Windows in their churches and cemeteries. Much of the documentation on these windows is limited or lost consisting of mainly brief mentions in Vestry and Session Minutes. A major find was the discovery of an original black and white drawing of one of these windows. This paper will discuss these findings in order to document, catalog, describe and analyze these windows