On a sunny Bronx morning late last year, an all-star team of stained glass experts prepared to enter a wet 1894 grave in Woodlawn Cemetery that had been opened only once in the past century.
The mausoleum at hand held the remains of José Maria Muñoz, a Panamanian-born New York merchant and son of a Spanish general. The Scholar Tomb Raiders were five energetic stained glass conservators and art historians who conducted an unprecedented survey of approximately 1,200 stained glass windows installed in freestanding Woodlawn mausoleums from 1878 to the present.
Woodlawn sits on 400 rolling acres decorated with 1,300 such private family mausoleums, including extravagant Golden Age temples built for captains of industry, robber barons and the very wealthy. These titans of wealth and their spouses often spent lavishly on decorating their final resting places—even if the interior of these grand structures were not meant to be seen by more than friends and family.
As soon as the group entered the mausoleum, screams could be heard bouncing off the inner stone walls. The experts had discovered a variety of stained glass that none of them had ever encountered before.
On the back wall of the tomb, behind the stone sarcophagus that filled most of the sticky chamber, a bejeweled glass sphere protruded from the flat plane of a stained glass window—stepping into the third dimension.
“Freaking out!” said Brianne Van Vorst, conservator at Liberty Stained Glass Conservation. “That’s wild!”
“Oh my God! Look at her in 3D!” exclaimed Lindsy R. Parrott, executive director and curator of the Neustadt, a large collection of stained glass by master artist Louis Comfort Tiffany.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, anywhere,” said Drew Anderson, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The multi-year survey, conducted under the direction of Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of American decorative arts at the Met, will include condition assessment, photographic documentation and archival research on each stained glass window in Woodlawn’s vast and diverse collection.
To gain access to some of the cemetery’s long sealed burial vaults, a local company cleverly adapted antique keys for mausoleums built by the same builder in the late 19th century.
“It totally feels like ‘Indiana Jones,'” Ms. Frelinghuysen said. “Sometimes we walk in and there’s this feeling of damp and mold and leaves, and you see an incredible window that you’ve never seen before.”
Woodlawn, because of the breadth of its window collection, is a virtual museum of stained glass techniques and styles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But until now, this collection has not been thoroughly studied. Thus, the research team relishes the opportunity to see so many long-hidden works of art in their original context, taking into account art history, conservation, architecture, religion and technology.
“We’re trying to better understand the diversity of stained glass makers in America by discovering windows that we can now attribute to different makers, most of whom most people have never heard of and some we’ve never heard of,” said Ms. Frelinghuysen, responsible for Tiffany glass.
Prior to the last quarter of the 19th century, stained glass windows were traditionally created by painting and staining the surface of white and colored glass. Highlights ranging from pale yellow to deep orange were achieved by applying silver nitrate to the back of the glass and firing it.
Beginning in the Gilded Age, however, Tiffany and John La Farge revolutionized the world of American stained glass with their innovative uses of iridescent glass, a material characterized, according to Ms. Parrott, by “an inner glow and a milky translucency that captures light and enhances color.”
Tiffany introduced glass to a wide color palette, which he used, along with glass of different textures and opacities, to create intricately detailed pictorial compositions admired for their painterly effects. The paint itself was generally kept to a minimum, for carefully selected details such as a figure’s face and hands.
Woodlawn has at least two windows by La Farge and more than 60 by Tiffany, and the survey, which is about half complete, has led to the new recognition of unsigned Tiffany works of extraordinary beauty and originality.
In the case of two recently investigated windows, “no one had ever seen these Tiffanys since the bodies came in and the last family members visited,” said Susan Olsen, director of historic services at Woodlawn, who is overseeing the project.
The research also illuminates dark corners of the American stained glass industry.
“The general public loves Tiffany and celebrates La Farge, but there were so many other studios producing great work, employing amazing designers, craftsmen and artisans, and taking bold risks using this new American iridescent glass material in innovative, exciting ways.” said Mrs. Parrott, the curator of Neustadt. “But the studios were small and maybe didn’t exist long, and so they’ve been lost in the annals of history — until now.”
Among the unseen artists whose work the team locates and explores is Edward Sperry, a designer who worked for Tiffany for 15 years. Mr. Sperry helped found another studio called the Church Glass and Decorating Company, ran the church division of the Gorham Manufacturing Company, and eventually established his own stained glass studio.
The 1907 window of the William Rhinelander Mausoleum in Woodlawn, signed by Mr. Sperry, depicts an angel kneeling before a cross. This and other windows “are beautifully designed and constructed, with a distinctive rendering of the faces of his figures that speaks to Sperry’s skill as a trained painter,” said Sophia Kamps, the research associate for the study.
Walter Janes Studio was another lesser known glass maker that produced fine windows in Woodlawn. Although the works are unsigned, the team was able to identify Janes as the creator of two windows in a mausoleum—one depicting Victory as a winged angel with a sword—through references in an Ohio trade publication and a New York Architectural Association yearbook. York.
But research has revealed many unsolved mysteries, such as the protruding orb in the Muñoz mausoleum, whose creator is unknown. Researching such matters can be difficult because Woodlawn records include the name of the company that built each mausoleum, but not the subcontracted stained glass manufacturer.
For conservators on the survey project, the priority is to assess the condition of Woodlawn’s old and often worn windows and triage them to determine which ones need urgent care.
After opening the pillared bronze doors of JG Payntar’s 1899 mausoleum, which Woodlawn gained access to last year for the first time since 1915, art historians quickly concluded that its window was an unsigned Tiffany work.
Notable for its richly saturated colors and subtle variation in shading and texture, the window depicted an angel looking down as a fiery sun sets behind a mountain. Ms. Frelinghuysen and Ms. Parrott speculated that the window may be a collaboration between two leading Tiffany designers: Frederick Wilson, an Englishman known for his fine ecclesiastical figures, and Agnes F. Northrop, a foliage wonder and landscapes.
“It’s wonderful,” Ms. Frelinghuysen said, noting how the wavy blue and green glass was chosen to simulate the water at the angel’s feet.
“But it will never be right until we make the face,” said Mr Anderson, who, like Ms Frelinghuysen and Ms Parrott, is donating his expertise to the research. (Other team members are reimbursed by Woodlawn.)
Indeed, the painted features of the angel’s face had almost disappeared, a loss which Mr Anderson said may have been caused by moisture attacking the windowpane and powdered glass in the paint.
He and Ms. Van Vorst emphasized that they hoped this project would influence others in their field to approach stained glass conservatively: Instead of replacing the faded face with a new one painted on a fresh piece of glass and throwing away the original, Mr. Anderson said, the team’s conservators will preserve the original ghost image of the face and “reintroduce the color in a reversible way,” such as by painting the facial features on a separate glass plate and placing it behind the faded face.
“The majority of these windows have never been preserved, they are untouched,” Ms. Olsen said. “It is important that all cemeteries know that the initial approach with a curator is so important.”
As the investigation progresses, Ms. Olsen is contacting the descendants of the mausoleum owners to “ask them to take ownership of their family property” by supporting the maintenance of their memorial windows, either financially or by giving Woodlawn permission to continue the maintenance. . He hopes to one day create a stained glass conservation studio right on the grounds of the cemetery.
Often the story behind a Gilded Age tomb is a fascinating web of art, architecture and conservation.
Picturing “the same architect associated with their Manhattan mansion and their Newport cottage” receiving a major final commission from a powerful client, Ms. Olsen said: “There they are at dinner with Stanford White and they say, “ Okay, Stanny, I have one more project for you: my mausoleum in Woodlawn.”