"Breaking Tradition: Distinguishing American Stained Glass"

In the nineteenth century, opalescent glass introduced an entirely new painterly and naturalistic aesthetic to the stained-glass industry in America. Artists at the forefront of the opalescent era, such as Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) and John La Farge (1835–1910), pioneered new techniques for coloring and forming glass, innovations which shaped public taste and distinguished American stained glass from its European counterparts. Breaking Tradition explores this dramatic shift and the ways artists adopted and broke from convention to redefine a centuries-old medium.