On a sunny morning in the Bronx late last year, an all-star team of stained glass experts prepared to enter a watery 1894 grave in Woodlawn Cemetery that had been opened only once in the past century.
The mausoleum contained the remains of José Maria Muñoz, a Panamanian-born New York merchant and son of a Spanish general. The learned grave robbers were five energetic stained glass conservators and art historians who conducted an unprecedented study of approximately 1,200 stained glass windows installed in freestanding Woodlawn mausoleums from 1878 to the present.
Woodlawn sits on 400 acres adorned with 1,300 such private family mausoleums, including extravagant Gilded Age temples built for captains of industry, robber barons and just the very wealthy. These titans of wealth and their spouses often spent a lot of money decorating their final resting places – even if the interiors of these magnificent structures were not intended to be seen by more than friends and family.
As soon as the team entered the mausoleum, screams could be heard echoing off the stone walls inside. The experts had discovered a variety of stained glass that they had never encountered before.
On the back wall of the tomb, behind the stone sarcophagus that filled most of the damp chamber, a jeweled sphere of blue glass rose from the flat plane of a stained glass window and burst into the third dimension.
“I'm freaking out!” said Brianne Van Vorst, conservator at Liberty Stained Glass Conservation. “That’s wild!”
“Oh my God! Look at the three-dimensionality!” exclaimed Lindsy R. Parrott, executive director and curator of Neustadt, a major 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 year-long investigation, conducted under the direction of Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, a curator of American decorative arts at the Met, includes a condition assessment, photographic documentation and archival research on every stained glass window in Woodlawn's extensive and diverse collection.
To gain access to some of the cemetery's long-locked burial chambers, a local company has cleverly adapted antique keys for mausoleums built by the same manufacturer in the late 19th century.
“It totally feels like 'Indiana Jones,'” Ms. Frelinghuysen said. “Sometimes when we walk in we get the feeling of damp, mold and leaves and you see an incredible window that you’ve never seen before.”
Woodlawn is a virtual museum of late 19th and early 20th century stained glass techniques and styles due to the breadth of its window collection. However, this collection had not been extensively examined to date. Therefore, the survey team welcomes the opportunity to examine so many long-hidden works of art in their original context and to consider them in the light of art history, patronage, architecture, religion and technology.
“We are trying to better understand the diversity of stained glass manufacturers in America by discovering windows that we can now attribute to different manufacturers that most people have never heard of and some we have never heard of,” said Ms. Frelinghuysen, an expert on Tiffany glass.
Before the last quarter of the 19th century, stained glass windows were traditionally made by painting and staining the surface of white and colored glass. Applying silver nitrate to the back of the disc and baking it produced highlights ranging from pale yellow to deep orange.
Beginning in the Golden Age, however, Tiffany and John La Farge revolutionized the world of American stained glass windows with their innovative use of opaline glass, a material characterized by “an inner luster and a milky translucency,” according to Ms. Parrott, that captures light and enhances color. “
Tiffany introduced glass in a wide range of colors, which he used together with glass of varying texture and opacity to create intricately detailed pictorial compositions that were admired for their painterly effect. Color itself was generally kept to a minimum for carefully chosen 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 halfway complete, has resulted in the new identification of unsigned Tiffany works of great beauty and originality.
In the case of two recently examined windows, “no one had ever seen these Tiffanys since the bodies were brought in and the last family members came to visit,” said Susan Olsen, Woodlawn's director of historical services, who is overseeing the project.
The survey also sheds light on 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 superlative work, employing great designers, craftsmen and artisans, and taking bold risks by using this new American material of opalescent glass in innovative, exciting ways “We used them in a way,” said Ms. Parrott, Neustadt’s curator. “But the studios were small and perhaps not there long, and so they have been lost to the annals of history – until now.”
Among the unsung artists whose work the team identified and researched was 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 ecclesiastical division of the Gorham Manufacturing Company, and eventually founded his own stained glass studio.
The 1907 window of the William Rhinelander Mausoleum in Woodlawn, signed by Mr. Sperry, shows an angel kneeling before a cross. This and other windows “are beautifully designed and constructed, with a distinctive depiction of his characters' faces, highlighting Sperry's skills as a trained painter,” said Sophia Kamps, research associate on the survey.
Walter Janes Studio was another lesser-known glass manufacturer 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, sword-wielding angel—using references in an Ohio trade magazine and an Architectural League of New York yearbook.
But the investigation has revealed many unsolved mysteries, such as the protruding orb in the Muñoz Mausoleum, whose creator is unknown. Researching such topics can be difficult because the Woodlawn archives list the name of the company that built each mausoleum, but not the stained glass manufacturer's subcontractor.
For the conservators on the survey project, the priority is to assess the condition of Woodlawn's old and often damaged windows and conduct triage to determine which windows are most in need of attention.
After opening the columned bronze doors of the 1899 JG Payntar mausoleum, which Woodlawn gained access to last year for the first time since 1915, art historians quickly concluded that the window was an unsigned Tiffany Work was about.
Distinguished by its rich colors and the subtle variations of its shades and textures, the window depicted an angel gazing downward as a fiery sun set behind a mountain. Ms. Frelinghuysen and Ms. Parrott speculated that the window might be a collaboration between two top Tiffany designers: Frederick Wilson, an Englishman known for his beautiful ecclesiastical figures, and Agnes F. Northrop, a marvel of foliage and landscapes.
“It’s fabulous,” Ms. Frelinghuysen said, noting the way wavy blue and green glass was chosen to simulate the water at the angel’s feet.
“But it will never be right until we fix the face,” said Mr. Anderson, who like Ms. Frelinghuysen and Ms. Parrott is bringing his expertise to the survey. (The other team members are compensated by Woodlawn.)
In fact, the angel's painted features were all but gone, a loss that Anderson suggested may have been due to moisture attacking the window glass and the glass powder in the paint.
He and Ms. Van Vorst emphasized that they hoped this project would encourage others in their field to approach stained glass conservatively: rather than replacing the faded face with a new one painted on a fresh piece of glass, and the original To throw away, Mr. Anderson said the team's restorers would retain the original ghost image of the face and “reintroduce color in a reversible way,” such as painting facial features on a separate glass plate and placing it behind the faded face.
“Most of these windows have never been preserved, they are untouched,” Ms Olsen said. “It is important that all cemeteries understand the importance of contacting a conservator first.”
As the survey progresses, Ms. Olsen is contacting descendants of mausoleum owners and asking them to “take ownership of their family property” by either financially supporting the preservation of their memorial windows or granting Woodlawn permission to continue preservation. She hopes to one day open a studio for preserving stained glass windows right on the cemetery grounds.
Often the story behind a Gilded Age tomb is a fascinating web of art, architecture and patronage.
Imagine “the same architect dealing with her Manhattan mansion and her Newport cottage” when Ms. Olsen received a significant final contract from an influential client and said, “There you are, having dinner with Stanford White, saying: 'Okay, Stanny, I got this.' another project for you: my mausoleum in Woodlawn.'”