Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, acquired a monumental landscape stained-glass window created by Tiffany Studios, marking the first window of its kind to enter the museum’s collection.
Measuring approximately nine feet tall by seven feet wide, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) was commissioned by Woodmen of the World in 1917 as a memorial to its founder Joseph Cullen Root. The window’s design, like several from this era, is attributed to Agnes F. Northrop, who served as lead designer and worked for Tiffany Studio for half a century.
“When you see the work, that combination of the illumination from the back and the grand scale, which really immerses you [in it], you feel that nature is emanating this power,” Jen Padgett, curator of craft at Crystal Bridges, told ARTnews in an interview. “As you look up close, it’s just this amazing kaleidoscope of color and texture.”
Because of their delicate nature and site-specificity, Tiffany Studio windows are rarely owned by major museums. Among the few prominent examples, however, are Hartwell Memorial Window (1917) at the Art Institute of Chicago and two—3-part Garden landscape window for Linden Hall (1912) and Autumn Landscape (1923–24)—owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; all three are also attributed to Northrop. (The Met’s Autumn Landscape was acquired in 1925 and never installed, while the other two were acquired by their respective institutions in the past five years.)
Another Northrop-designed Tiffany Studios window, The Danner Memorial Window (1913), came to auction last November in a modern art sale at Sotheby’s, where it sold for $12.5 million, setting a record for the studio.
Detailed view of Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window).
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
The history of the Root Memorial Window is also unique. As part of its 1917 commission, it was initially conceived of a space at the headquarters of the Woodmen of the World organization in Omaha, Nebraska. Then, in 1931, it was moved to San Antonio, Texas, to anchor the ecumenical Fraser Chapel at a tuberculosis hospital that the organization was building. Its president at the time, William Frazier, was originally from Texas and “advocated for the healing qualities of being in the Texas sunshine,” according to Padgett.
“It was for people of all different faiths to have this experience of seeing this amazing scene of nature in a place of healing and spirituality. That resonates to thinking at Crystal Bridges, and how we advocate for thinking about the whole health of an individual and how art can contribute to wellness and flourishing,” she added.
After the hospital closed and its building razed, the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ acquired the Fraser Chapel in 1959 and has stewarded the Root Memorial Window ever since. During those more than five decades, “there’s been this kind of energetic thread of healing in this particular place—energetically, spiritually, that thread still carries on,” Taylor Bates, the deputy director of Sunset Ridge Collective, an affiliated organization of the church, told ARTnews. “I find it interesting that in 1931, this community of people from all over the country who came together to build this sacred space as a place of healing who thought an important aspect of our healing is art and beauty.”
The acquisition was in the works for around a year when Sunset Ridge first approached Crystal Bridges about the possibility of taking over stewardship of the window at the recommendation of Bryant J. Stanton, a stained-glass restorer based in Waco, Texas. Bates noted that Sunset Ridge had been approached over the years by private collectors interested in purchasing the Root Memorial Window, but they always declined, seeing it as a museum-quality object that one day would need to be cared for by museum professionals.
The exterior of the Fraser Chapel, where the Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) was previously installed.
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
As part of a rethinking of the church’s campus and community reach in San Antonio’s Terrell Heights neighborhood, which has included creating artist studios, a nature-based pre-school, and farmer’s market, Sunset Ridge realized it was time to renovate the Fraser Chapel, including by making it ADA compliant. In order to do that, they realized that the Root Memorial Window would need to be removed before any form of construction could begin. “That’s when we started to ask the question, ‘Is it time to consider a new home for the window?’” Bates recalled, noting that Sunset Ridge also wanted to ensure “it could be seen and experienced by multitudes of more people.”
In evaluating the cost of that and the related insurance prices to maintain the window into the future, the expenses rose beyond what Sunset Ridge would be able to handle. It was around this time that Stanton reached out to Crystal Bridges to see if it might be interested in acquiring the window. After Padgett conducted a site visit to Sunset Ridge to evaluate the Tiffany window last summer, she began the formal process for its acquisition into the Crystal Bridges permanent collection, which was approved at the end of last year. (Crystal Bridges declined to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.)
“This window leaving our chapel is really significant, and we’ve had to grieve that,” Bates said. On the day of its deinstallation, “we had a spontaneous, ritualistic way of saying goodbye to the window, inviting the congregation to stand in front of it and acknowledge everything it’s seen and witnessed over the decades of being in this particular place.”
Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) installed at Sunset Ridge, prior to its removal for conservation.
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Conserving a Window
What distinguishes Tiffany Studios work in stained glass is that the color is infused directly into multiple levels of glasses, which at times can number to four or five layers, as opposed to the more traditional European style, in which the glass is hand-painted, or stained glass windows that have just one pane of glass. Similarly, the Root Memorial Window also uses a variety of stained-glass techniques that distinguish it as a work by Tiffany Studios, including a confetti technique in which small shards of differently colored glass are sprinkled over the base layer of glass. These techniques add to the sense of the depth in the scene.
“The fact that there’s absolutely no paint on this glass—all the depth, the color, and figurative references are created only by glass—speaks to the innovation of the American Arts and Crafts movement,” stained glass conservator Ariana Makau, who is leading the window’s conservation, told ARTnews.
To further illustrate the innovation in the Root Memorial Window, Padgett pointed to the mountain peak that can be seen in the center of the composition. “The edges of the mountains are not in the front pane of the glass, they’re in a pane that’s further to the back, so when we see the ridges of the mountain, it feels like atmospheric perspective. It has this kind of hazy view into the distance.”
These approaches allow for a higher saturation of color and depth of texture and perspective—but they also complicate the work’s conservation.
Detailed view of Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window).
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
After the window was deinstalled earlier this month, it was sent to Makau’s Nzilani Glass Conversation studio in Oakland, California, where it has gone through a thorough analysis, including documentation and notations about its condition and the various passages that might need restoration. That work will wrap in the coming days and then its conservation, which will likely take several months, will begin.
“One of the challenges—and one of the most amazing things—about Tiffany Windows is that they’re plated,” Makau said. “Most leaded art glass windows have one piece of glass that’s the same from the front and the back. But, with Tiffany, on the front, it seems relatively flat, and then on the back, it looks like a topographic map.”
The main focus of the conversation project is to clean layers of dirt from the glass, acquired over years of exposure to both the wind, sun, trees, and possibly smoke from candles in the chapel nearby, as well as horizontal water-mark lines that indicate a possible “water egress that came in between the plating for a little bit, and then evaporated over time because it’s so hot in Texas,” according to Makau. Additionally, any cracks will be repaired by being filled in with a museum-grade epoxy, which can be mixed with color, that that has the same refractive index as glass, or “reflects light the same way glass does,” she said.
Despite its age and exposure, the window is relatively stable and does not need to be taken apart and re-leaded to be restored to its original colorations. Because the Root Memorial Window will be displayed in a temperature-controlled gallery at Crystal Bridges and not exposed to the elements, Makau said that it will not need to add additional protective layers to the window, as it has for Tiffany Windows that have been reinstalled in homes.
“In this case, I think we’re going to reveal a lot of the vibrancy that was lost over time,” Makau said. “Every single piece was so thoughtfully chosen and placed.”
Detailed view of Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window).
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Going on View
Growing its holdings in craft is one of the museum’s top priorities when it comes to acquisitions, including objects made in stained glass. Currently, it only owns one other stained-glass work, a Wisteria table lamp (ca. 1905–06), designed by Clara Driscoll for Tiffany Studios.
Since its founding in 2011, by philanthropist and collector Alice Walton, Crystal Bridges has focused on building a museum that highlights American art in a variety of expressions, surrounded by nature via the 134-acre park it sits on. One approach is “the idea that craft is accessible, that it has a democratic quality that people can have connections to in so many different kinds of materials is definitely something that we are embracing,” Padgett said.
Oftentimes, Crystal Bridges visitors’ first encounters will art-making might be via craft, as opposed to “When people come to the museum, we want to present this really full picture of what American art looks, pulling out those stories and themes that help to move away from some of the art historical hierarchies,” she said. “Instead, it’s about how can your imagination and understanding of American history and the present be sparked by these objects.”
A different angle of Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), at Sunset Ridge, shows how it changes depending on the time of day or where a viewer stands.
Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Crystal Bridges is also going through a major expansion that will open in 2026, which will increase its footprint by 50 percent. Of the additional, 114,000 square feet that will be added, about 25,000 square feet will be dedicated gallery space, with an additional 20,000 square feet of interstitial space in which art might be installed.
This expansion will also see the museum’s permanent collection galleries be completely reinstalled across both the original building and the new building. The acquisitions of craft—as well as Indigenous art, another current collecting priority—will be a major focus in juxtaposing work from different time periods and different mediums into various thematically focused galleries.
As part of the reinstallation of the galleries, the Root Memorial Window will go on view as a centerpiece of a gallery that will also feature landscape paintings as well as other works that relate to nature. “It’ll have this special moment of highlight, as a showstopper in the galleries,” Padgett said of the window, adding that the experience of “seeing that work can also help you see, say, Kindred Spirits by Asher B. Durand, or works by Thomas Cole in different ways.”
For its installation, the window will have its own system of artificial lighting that “replicates to the best of what we can [mimic] seeing the window in a space, like the church setting, where it’s illuminated by the natural light,” Padgett said. A possible approach might include a time element that would account for the window being lit at different times of day, as well as in different seasons, to show how the shifting light changes the illumination and coloration of the window.
