Tiffany Window Smashes Expectations, Sells for Record $12.48 Million

When Sotheby’s announced the Danner Memorial Window would be up for auction, it was cause for excitement. Windows by Tiffany Studios rarely come to auction, and the Danner Memorial Window, commissioned for the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio, in 1913, is an especially beautiful example. Sotheby’s offered the window at its Nov. 18 Modern Evening Auction in New York; it had a presale estimate of $5 million to $7 million. It more than exceeded expectations by selling for $12.48 million, the highest price any Tiffany Studios piece has achieved at auction.

This isn’t the first time Tiffany Studios has held that record. The last time the window sold at auction was at Christie’s in 2000, when billionaire Alan Gerry bought it for $1.9 million, then an auction record for Tiffany Studios.

The new record price isn’t the only groundbreaking part of the sale. This was the first time Sotheby’s sold a Tiffany window, which usually falls into the category of decorative arts, at an evening fine art auction. Jodi Pollack, head of twentieth-century design at Sotheby’s, called the sale “a landmark moment for the Tiffany market,” placing Tiffany Studios and its artists “within the pantheon of the most iconic artists of the twentieth century.” She describes the window, with its vibrant colors and serene landscape scene, as having “the same painterly effects of light as the great impressionist painters of their time.”

The “Tiffany Girls.”

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of Art

While Louis Comfort Tiffany certainly earned his place among great American designers, the lesser-known artists who worked for his studio cannot be forgotten. Many were women, the so-called “Tiffany Girls,” or Women’s Glass Cutting Department, employed to create designs and select glass for leaded windows and lamps. The Danner Memorial Window was the work of one of these women, Agnes Northrop. Northrop began working for Tiffany Studios in the 1880s and had her own design studio within the company by the 1890s. She designed for Tiffany Studios for over 50 years.

Today, Northrop’s windows and design studies can be found in museum collections. But the Danner Memorial Window has a new, anonymous, record-setting owner.

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