A Glass Paradise

'THE GREAT THING IN ART that has helped me more than anything is the practice of looking at the beautiful and shutting out the ugly," declared Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1910.

- BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Admired today for his exceptional legacy as a designer and producer of decorative glass, Tiffany (1848-1933) was trained as a painter-notably under the landscapist George Inness.

That training nourished his imagination in the areas over which he spread his creative wings, especially the celebrated lamps he produced with distinctive leaded glass shades, and delicate objects fashioned in iridescent "Favrile" glass.

But of all his productions, stained glass windows would have provided the perfect means for "shutting out the ugly." For the centenary of its American Wing last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art installed one of the grandest of all Tiffany windows: a newly acquired, monumental threepart "Garden Landscape."

Over 20 feet wide, its center panel over 10 feet tall, this captivating glass triptych was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a Pittsburgh industrialist and philanthropist, for her mansion, Linden Hall, built in 1912. It was designed by Agnes Northrop, Tiffany's chief designer of garden and landscape windows, whose signed watercolor drawing for the center panel is in the Met collection.