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Tiffany glass in Toronto

Ladies Mile

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I have a question from a New York contact working on a possible exhibition/article on Tiffany glass in the Great Lakes area who has been looking for Toronto examples (if extant). Anyone know of any? It's not my taste, so I have never paid much attention to work of that style in Toronto. Google seems to show nothing.
 
I can't think of any in Toronto but I'm sure your contact is aware of the Macy's department store in Chicago?

Edited to add... The store that used to be Marshall Fields.
 
I can't think of any in Toronto but I'm sure your contact is aware of the Macy's department store in Chicago?

Edited to add... The store that used to be Marshall Fields.

Yes, ditto the library building in Chicago. There appears to be a vast quantity of original work in the Great Lakes region stateside, but I can't remember ever hearing about a window or mosaic in Toronto. Possible there is some domestic work?
 
The largest collection of Tiffany windows outside the US are the 20 windows in Montreal's Erskine and American United Church, which has been converted into a concert hall, part of the Museum of Fine Arts. The MBA also has one of the largest collection of Tiffany's work anywhere.

http://www.mbam.qc.ca/au2011/en/02b.html

(sorry for that bit of Mtl's boosterism, but maybe it can help your friend)
 
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At this point I'll shamelessly hijack this thread with a link to one of Toronto's leading stained glass manufacturers - McCausland, founded in 1856 - since I believe our local design culture has never needed to take a back seat to anyone. Perhaps McCausland's best known stained glass work is the dome in the 1885 Bank of Montreal building at Yonge and Front, now the Hockey Hall of Fame:

http://stainedglasscanada.ca/articles/mccauseland.htm
 
At this point I'll shamelessly hijack this thread with a link to one of Toronto's leading stained glass manufacturers - McCausland, founded in 1856 - since I believe our local design culture has never needed to take a back seat to anyone. Perhaps McCausland's best known stained glass work is the dome in the 1885 Bank of Montreal building at Yonge and Front, now the Hockey Hall of Fame:

http://stainedglasscanada.ca/articles/mccauseland.htm

In honesty, McCausland was a top-level craftsman, but hardly an innovator the way Tiffany and La Farge were. I don't care for the style but it is undeniably an original thing.
 
The Tiffany glass window in the Cathedral was designed by Edward Sperry and installed about 1905.

More than that one, however, I'm enamoured of the two 1930s-era windows in St. George's Chapel ( a small and surprisingly tall room, located on the east side of the main entrance to the Cathedral, with a dramatic and rather unexpected spiral staircase ), which were designed by Peter Haworth, who ran the art department at Central Tech. Can't find any images of the entire windows online - just details - but well worth a look:

Peter Haworth, R.C.A. O.S.A. was born in Lancaster, England, on February 28, 1889. He studied at the Accrington School of Art and then, on scholarship, at the Manchester School of Art. In 1914 he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London. He served in World War I from 1915-1918 and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. In 1918, he returned to the Royal College of Art graduating with his A.R.C.A. He studied under Anning Bell, a noted designer of stained glass and was influenced by Burne-Jones and William Morris.

He came to Canada in 1923 and accepted a job as teacher at the Central Technical School in Toronto, becoming director of the art department in 1928. In 1939 he was appointed instructor in Design and Drawing at the University of Toronto.

He was accepted as a respected watercolour painter, but his major contribution seems to be in stained glass, in which he had begun working very early in his career. During the 1920's and 1930's he produced stained-glass windows for more than sixty churches and schools in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. The manufacture of his windows was always carried out by the firm of Pringle and London of Toronto, but always under his close supervision. He personally selected stained glass in England or the United States. Most of the glass for his major works came from Alesburg, England, famed for the depth of colour and rich texture of its product. Generally, the more texture in a piece of stained glass, the better it will reflect the light and Haworth selected each piece of glass for each given area of design.

In 1952, Melwyn Breem of the Toronto 'Saturday Night' described Haworth's studio as follows; "We found Mr. Haworth in his study surrounded by the tools and materials of his work - samples of stained glass, stacks of exquisite, jewel like and meticulously painted sketches, and huge 'cartoons' which are the blueprints for a finished window... – steps in the designs he has done for many churches in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa ... and elsewhere. ... (He and his assistant)... first make a ... sketch of the finished window. ... The sketch is then redrawn ... to actual scale as a 'cartoon’. The cartoon is then taken to the firm that does the actual glass making and assembling and, under Haworth's supervision, the glass sections in the design are keyed to show the colour and shape of the piece to be used. ... Templates are cut out and used as patterns for the glass. These are then cut with diamond cutters. After this comes the etching and painting of the detail. Then it is ready to be assembled and 'leaded'. The leading itself may be half an inch, a quarter of an inch or three-eighths of an inch thick, depending on the size and weight of the window. The leads are simply strips of the metal, flanged in the middle to separate adjacent pieces of glass, which are then cemented in. Then comes the actual installation of the window."

Here's an example of Haworth's work in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's collection, showing characteristic clarity of colour ( click on the image to enlarge ):

http://www.mbam.qc.ca/au2011/en/02b.html
 
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... and here, taking Ladies Mile's thread even further away from what it's supposed to be about, is a link to the Church of the Holy Trinity, located near the Eaton Centre. They have a range of different kinds of windows, including McCausland but alas no Tiffany ... and four bold designs installed after the 1977 fire, each of which just about reads as a whole despite being divided into five sections as a result of having to fit into the original windows.

http://www.yorku.ca/rsgc/HolyTrinity.html
 
I was at the Currelly Society lunch at the ROM today, where curators Robert Little and Brian Musselwhite ( who are involved with the current The Art of Collecting exhibition ) gave a talk, and I asked them about local examples of Tiffany stained glass. There are private collectors, and one example ( though not the owner's name ) was described to me ( "an angel" ), but there are no other public examples locally other than the one at St. James. But St. Paul's cathedral in London, Ontario has examples; this is from their website:

The two windows next to the Nativity window and the two opposite are the work of Louis Tiffany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two are actually signed by him. They are in memory of the members of the Meredith family.

The ROM has three Tiffany lamps in their collection in addition to the one mentioned earlier - I think they were donated by the Ostry's. I believe they're of the more typical multi-coloured style - a daffodil pattern, and poppies, I believe he said.
 

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