Tiffany Window Smashes Expectations, Sells for Record $12.48 Million

Danner Memorial Window

Sotheby's

When Sotheby’s introduced the Danner Memorial Window could be up for public sale, it was trigger for pleasure. Home windows by Tiffany Studios hardly ever come to public sale, and the Danner Memorial Window, commissioned for the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio, in 1913, is an particularly stunning instance. Sotheby’s supplied the window at its Nov. 18 Fashionable Night Public sale in New York; it had a presale estimate of $5 million to $7 million. It greater than exceeded expectations by promoting for $12.48 million, the very best value any Tiffany Studios piece has achieved at public sale.

This isn’t the primary time Tiffany Studios has held that file. The final time the window offered at public sale was at Christie’s in 2000, when billionaire Alan Gerry purchased it for $1.9 million, then an public sale file for Tiffany Studios.

The brand new file value isn’t the one groundbreaking a part of the sale. This was the primary time Sotheby’s offered a Tiffany window, which normally falls into the class of ornamental arts, at a night advantageous artwork public sale. Jodi Pollack, head of twentieth-century design at Sotheby’s, referred to as the sale “a landmark second for the Tiffany market,” putting Tiffany Studios and its artists “throughout the pantheon of essentially the most iconic artists of the 20th century.” She describes the window, with its vibrant colours and serene panorama scene, as having “the identical painterly results of sunshine as the good impressionist painters of their time.”

The “Tiffany Women.”

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of Artwork

Whereas Louis Consolation Tiffany definitely earned his place amongst nice American designers, the lesser-known artists who labored for his studio can’t be forgotten. Many have been girls, the so-called “Tiffany Women,” or Ladies’s Glass Reducing Division, employed to create designs and choose glass for leaded home windows and lamps. The Danner Memorial Window was the work of certainly one of these girls, Agnes Northrop. Northrop started working for Tiffany Studios within the Eighties and had her personal design studio throughout the firm by the Eighteen Nineties. She designed for Tiffany Studios for over 50 years.

Right this moment, Northrop’s home windows and design research could be present in museum collections. However the Danner Memorial Window has a brand new, nameless, record-setting proprietor.