Frederick Wilson | |
|---|---|
 Frederick Wilson circa 1891 | |
| Born | November 3, 1858 |
| Died | March 24, 1932 (aged 74) |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | stained glass, mosaic |
| Spouse | Mary Gwladys Morgan (1891-1932; his death) |
Frederick Wilson (3 November 1858 - 24 March 1932) was a British stained glass artist best known for his work with Tiffany Studios. He was a prominent designer of ecclesiastical windows in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [1] [2]
Frederick Wilson was born in Dublin, Ireland to English parents, Charles and Elizabeth Wilson. The family eventually moved to England and Wilson and his six siblings were raised in both Liverpool and London. [3] Although little is known about Wilson's early artistic education, there is evidence that he attended the South Kensington School, which was associated with the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum). [3]
In 1891, Wilson married Mary Gwladys Morgan, and the following year they immigrated to the United States. The couple had three children: Gladys, Sylvia and Beatrice.
Frederick Wilson's career designing stained glass spanned more than 50 years. He was "known and accepted as an important artist in his field" during his lifetime, and his work had a major impact on how American ecclesiastical stained glass looked around the turn of the 20th century. [3]
Perhaps best known for his work at Tiffany Studios, Wilson also designed windows for at least five other firms, including: Heaton, Butler and Bayne, London, England; Alfred Godwin and Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Gorham Manufacturing Company, Providence, Rhode Island; The Los Angeles Art Glass Company, Los Angeles, California; and Judson Studios, also in Los Angeles. [3]
Over the course of his career, Wilson was a member of several professional arts groups, including the Art Club of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the American Federation of Arts, and the Architectural League of New York. [3]
Wilson likely began his artistic career in England in the 1870s. He was heavily influenced by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, and incorporated ecclesiastical subjects in his designs from a young age. [3]
In 1892, Wilson and his wife Mary emigrated to the United States. He soon found employment at Alfred Godwin and Company in Philadelphia. However, there are no known Wilson designs executed by the company, and by 1893 he began working for Tiffany Studios. [3]
Wilson was among the most prominent and prolific designers at Tiffany Studios, and was the first in-house designer in the Ecclesiastical Department. [4] [5] He likely joined the firm sometime in 1893, and that same year exhibited one of his designs using Tiffany's name at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Wilson was awarded a gold medal for work under his own name at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, France in 1900. [6]
In 1897, Wilson became Tiffany Studio's chief window designer. [7] Two years later, in 1899, he was appointed the head of the Ecclesiastical Department. [8] During this time he maintained his own studio in Briarcliff Manor, New York, and would often work there instead of at the Tiffany Studios factory in Corona, Queens.
Wilson left Tiffany Studios in 1923. [7] He moved to Los Angeles to work for Judson Studios. There, he received commissions for his work across the state, including a commission from the Judson family themselves on the death of William Lees Judson, the founder of the College of Fine Arts of the University of Southern California and the father of Judson Studios founder, Walter Judson. [3] [9]
Wilson's final commission was for a series of windows to be installed in Garrett Memorial Chapel in, Jerusalem, New York. He completed the designs for the windows in 1931, but did not live to see their installation in 1932. [10]
Wilson passed away in March 1932 in Los Angeles.
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.
Stained glass is coloured glass as a material or works created from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant religious buildings. Although traditionally made in flat panels and used as windows, the creations of modern stained glass artists also include three-dimensional structures and sculpture. Modern vernacular usage has often extended the term "stained glass" to include domestic lead light and objets d'art created from foil glasswork exemplified in the famous lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.
A Tiffany lamp is a type of lamp with a camed glass shade designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany or colleagues, and made in his design studio. The glass in the lampshades is put together with the copper-foil technique instead of leaded, the classic technique for stained-glass windows. Tiffany lamps are considered part of the Art Nouveau movement. Considerable numbers of designs were produced from 1893 onwards.
The Arlington Street Church is a Unitarian Universalist church across from the Public Garden in Boston, Massachusetts. Because of its geographic prominence and the notable ministers who have served the congregation, the church is considered to be among the most historically important in American Unitarianism and Unitarian Universalism. Completed in 1861, it was designed by Arthur Gilman and Gridley James Fox Bryant to resemble James Gibbs' St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. The main sanctuary space has 16 large-scale stained-glass windows installed by Tiffany Studios from 1899 to 1930.
St. Michael's Church is a historic Episcopal church at 225 West 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York City. The parish was founded on the present site in January 1807, at that time in the rural Bloomingdale District. The present limestone Romanesque building, the third on the site, was built in 1890–91 to designs by Robert W. Gibson and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
Tiffany glass refers to the many and varied types of glass developed and produced from 1878 to 1933 at the Tiffany Studios in New York City, by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a team of other designers, including Clara Driscoll, Agnes F. Northrop, and Frederick Wilson.
Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., is a large, Gothic Revival-style church built in 1870 and located at Park Avenue and Lafayette Avenue in the city's Bolton Hill neighborhood. Named in memory of a 19th-century Baltimore financier, the ornate church is noted for its exquisite stained glass windows by renowned artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, soaring vaulted ceiling, and the prominent persons associated with its history. Maltbie Babcock, who was the church's pastor 1887–1900, wrote the familiar hymn, This is My Father's World. Storied virtuoso concert performer Virgil Fox was organist at Brown Memorial early in his career (1936–1946).
Judson Studios is a fine arts studio specializing in stained glass located in the Highland Park section of northeast Los Angeles. The stained glass studio was founded in the Mott Alley section of downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1890s by English-born artist William Lees Judson and his three sons. It moved to its current location in 1920 and remains in operation as a family-run business. The Judson Studios building was named a Historic-Cultural Landmark by the City of Los Angeles in 1969 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
J&R Lamb Studios, America's oldest continuously-run decorative arts company, is famous as a stained glass maker, preceding the studios of both John LaFarge and Louis C. Tiffany.
William Willet was an American portrait painter, muralist, stained glass designer, studio owner and writer. An early proponent of the Gothic Revival and active in the "Early School" of American stained glass, he founded the Willet Stained Glass and Decorating Company, a stained glass studio, with his wife Anne Lee Willet, in protest against the opalescent pictorial windows which were the rage at the turn of the twentieth century.
Charles Jay Connick (1875–1945) was a prominent American painter, muralist, and designer best known for his work in stained glass in the Gothic Revival style. Born in Springboro, Pennsylvania, Connick eventually settled in the Boston area where he opened his studio in 1913. Connick's work is contained in many preeminent churches and chapels, including examples in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. He also authored the book Adventures in Light and Color in 1937. Connick's studio continued to operate, and remained a leading producer of stained glass, until 1986.
Angel of the Resurrection is a massive stained glass window by the American Art Nouveau glass manufacturer Tiffany Studios, now in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). It was commissioned by former-First Lady Mary Dimmick Harrison as a memorial to her husband, President Benjamin Harrison. Completed in 1904, the window depicts the Archangel Michael calling for the dead to rise at the Second Coming.
Peter Mollica is an American stained glass artist.
Katharine Lamb Tait was an American stained glass and mosaics designer, painter, muralist, and illustrator. She was the head designer at J&R Lamb Studios for more than four decades, and created notable commissions for the Tuskegee Institute Chapel and for chapels at the United States Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, among others.
Alfred Godwin (1850–1934) was an English-born stained-glass artist, who settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Nicola D'Ascenzo was an Italian-born American stained glass designer, painter and instructor. He is best known for creating stained glass windows for the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; the Nipper Building in Camden, New Jersey; the Loyola Alumni Chapel of Our Lady at Loyola University Maryland; the Folger Shakespeare Library and Washington National Cathedral, both in Washington, D.C.
Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast was an American artist. Best known for stained glass, her professional career encompassed roles as architect, muralist, mosaic artist, textile artist, inventor, writer, and studio boss.
Art Nouveau temples are churches, chapels, synagogues, and mosques built in the style known as Art Nouveau in French and English languages, Jugendstil in Germany and Nordic countries, Secessionsstil in countries of former Austro-Hungary, Modernisme in Catalan, Modern in Russian, Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italian. As National Romantic style is also referred to Art Nouveau, churches of that style are also listed here, as well as some temples not of pure Art Nouveau style but with distinctive Art Nouveau features.
Benjamin Sellers (1860–1930) was a stained glass artisan in the Northeastern US. He was a practitioner of the opalescent style of stained glass popularized by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 19th century.
