Lots of Tiffany glass in area thanks to Chicago world’s fair
Published 10:22 am Thursday, March 4, 2010
By JOHN EBY
Dowagiac Daily News
Creating stained glass is not unlike piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, unless you happen to be working on a 103-foot by 55-foot Missouri window which contains a staggering 65,000 pieces.
“That’s pretty incredible when you think about numbering your patterns,” Southwestern Michigan College ceramics instructor and stained glass artist Sherrie Styx said. “My one son said to me, ‘I don’t understand why you have this big piece of glass and you’re breaking it up, then putting it back together.’ ”
Styx sent herself to the Watervliet emergency room Christmas Eve trying to finish a stained glass kaleidoscope for her mother.
She spoke Wednesday night at The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College as the second installment in its spring lecture series.
The free series continues at 6:30 p.m. April 7 with “America’s Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright” by Kristen Patzer Umphrey of History Center at Courthouse Square in Berrien Springs and concludes May 5 with a program on the Boy Scouts centennial by Niles Scoutmaster Jim Ellis.
Though discreetly concealed, large stained glass windows, such as those from Dowagiac’s Beckwith Theatre displayed in the museum, are reinforced with rebar. Otherwise, they collapse.
Today she was visiting a Catholic church in downtown South Bend, Ind., with a bowed window from lead deterioration over time.
She said Beckwith Theatre was adorned with stained glass windows in the entrance measuring 16 feet by 18 feet. The front window of the bank was a 17-foot semi-circle.
The auditorium had leaded glass wreaths and ribbons. Most were amber gold.
Cook Lumber has two stained glass windows and Barb Cook’s home in Sumnerville has one from the Nugent house.
One of Styx’s favorite stained glass works, View of Oyster Bay, in New York, was made in 1908 and measures 72 feet by 66 feet.
Stained glass “is all about color and how you can bring it into your house,” Styx said. “You don’t have to remodel your room, just put in a window to bring in some vibrant reds and greens.”
Styx, of Hartford, traced her family tree to Cass County when she lived in Chicago. “Cass County was established in 1821,” she said. “The War of 1812 was just over and there was a Blackhawk War going. People migrated across the United States. Dowagiac had its first mill and the dam was built in 1833; 1836, the stagecoach is well-established to bring some traffic into town; 1848, the first school west of Detroit was established. Railroad lines come through and people are getting on trains and traveling.”
In the mid-1880s, Philo D. Beckwith and his Round Oak Stove helped Dowagiac grow.
By 1898, Lee Memorial Hospital starts, followed in 1903 by the depot.
In the wider world, Louis Comfort Tiffany lived from 1848 to 1933.
He becomes instrumental and controversial in stained glass with his ornate collectible lamps.
In 1893, he is in Chicago for the world’s fair, the Columbian Exposition, which “transformed” that city. Tiffany’s father started in jewelry in New York.
“I love jewelry,” Styx said. “I teach metalsmithing and a little bit of pottery. These and glass are three-dimensional mediums, where painting is more a 2-D medium. You can really put your hands on it and become involved with your project. Our world’s not flat. I think you see more stained glass in this area because of Tiffany. People from Dowagiac went to the world’s fair. My great-grandmother was born in 1876. She told me about the world’s fair, but I was a kid and I didn’t listen. We need to listen to older people when they talk.”
At the world’s fair Tiffany created a chapel interior.
“People are comfortable with what they’re used to,” Styx said, “but something totally new makes it difficult for people. These archways and mosaics are saved in Winter Park, Fla.” just as SMC saved eight busts from Beckwith Theatre when it was demolished in 1966 and incorporated the medallions into pillars outside the Dale A. Lyons Building.
“Our college students can go online and visit museums they could never go to in person,” Styx said. “You can do that, too, which is so incredible. You can ‘walk’ through the Louvre in France. Last summer, my son was going to Washington, D.C., for his high school field trip. I wanted to know what was in D.C. I’ve never been there. I went online to the Smithsonian and ‘walked around.’ I wanted to see the rocks and gems. I knew exactly where they were when I got to the museum because we had an hour.”
Tiffany lamps might feature dragonflies with glowing red eyes.
“Bored” with the limited number of glass colors, Tiffany preferred opalescent, with a milky sheen, textured instead of transparent.
He worked with a glass company in Kokomo, Ind., which Styx planned to visit today to stock up on wholesale glass. SMC this summer will offer a class which includes a field trip to Kokomo.
Another lamp with which Tiffany transformed the industry, “Cobwebs,” hides a spider.
“He wants you to really examine the art,” said Styx, who owns a Tiffany lamp. “He wants you to remember your art, which is called L’Art Nouveau, French for ‘new art.’ He was inspired by nature and used organic items such as floral items and seashells. He layered glass to get way more color – up to eight layers. Others paint on the glass. He also developed soldering, which today we call (copper) foiling, which we teach, because lead is so dangerous.”
Stained glass “is a dirty art,” she said, more like oil painting than watercolor. “You have to grind your glass. That process leaves your clothes dirty. It’s a very tactile art. You have to wear a mask when you’re grinding to make sure glass doesn’t go into your lungs. It’s carcinogenic.”
When Philo D. Beckwith died, his daughter, Kate, and son-in-law, Fred Lee, memorialized him with an “exquisite” 1893 theater which stood on the corner of Front and Beeson streets where Beckwith Park is today.
The Beckwith was regarded as one of the finest theaters between New York and Chicago.
“The excitement when it opened burst off the newspaper page,” Styx said. “This theater building had a bank, City Hall and the Round Oak Co. It had every type of arch there was in art history. It has kind of a Greek design, with a little bit of French. The newspaper said, ‘Art outdoes even art.’ The inside of this building was so exquisite to outdo everything.”
The Beckwith opened with Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” which strikes Styx as “ironic.”
“The inside of the theater was kind of classical Greek with decorations by J. Frederick Scott. A lot of people from Chicago came here to work on the building. I’ve not found proof, but it’s possible that Tiffany came here or that some of those windows were Tiffany’s. It had silk draperies, elegant carpets and chairs upholstered by hand and dyed in Germany. All this exquisite detail tells me they put a lot of care and time into this building to make it perfect.”
Styx showed a series of slides of stained glass, from Groner Funeral Home to Dowagiac churches, including Federated Covenant, St. Paul’s Episcopal, First Christian Church, First United Methodist Church, Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church (hand-painted by French nuns), Holy Maternity of Mary Catholic Church and her own St. John’s Lutheran Church.
“Our church had amber windows,” she said, “and we had the idea of everyone in the church learning how to cut stained glass. We’re one of the few churches where we opened it up and taught each other. I think the oldest I taught was 95 and the youngest was 4. It’s neat that people can cut glass themselves. Then, when they look in their window, they can actually see the pieces they cut. Free labor is a way of doing the windows very affordably.”
The project took more than seven years, but was finished for the church on McCleary’s 50th anniversary in February 2008.
There are 36 windows.
Each depicts a different Bible story.
Since “I like to do really delicate work,” for St. John’s she created a 50-piece Bethlehem background in a space three inches square.
“You have to be careful when you’re mad in front of your pastor,” she smiled.
“With paint, you can get much more detail than cutting glass,” she explained. “A lot of stained glass windows have some sort of remembrance story behind them. Al (Potter) says who makes stained glass windows, their name gets lost in history, and the window itself becomes more prominent than the artist behind it who designed it.”
Styx said first a pattern “has to be able to be cut. A lot of patterns that are online right now are made for cutting with a bandsaw – not with a glass cutter. Each piece has to be able to be cut out by hand. It’s kind of like sewing where you do a pattern and each piece is labeled and numbered. Here, when we teach a stained glass class, you’re not allowed to have more than 30 pieces because you’ll go insane. Six or seven pieces is nice for your first project. Each pattern cut out is taped to the glass, which you can cut to fit the pattern and capture wonderful color.”
Styx cuts glass with a pistol-grip device with oil in its handle to lubricate the diamond-blade wheel and keep it “floating.”
“I can’t cut for more than two hours at a time or it bothers my wrist. I always stand so I can put pressure down. Cutting glass does involve cutting your fingers, but it’s nothing, like a paper cut.
“My mom said her favorite toy as a kid was a kaleidoscope, so I made her one out of stained glass. Semester’s over, Christmas Eve, and I’m finishing it up. I never cut my fingertips, it’s always doing something stupid. I reached in the drawer to get something without paying attention.”
Hence, the three-stitch visit to the Watervliet ER.
“The lady said, ‘What are you going to do when you go home?’
“I’ve got to finish my project, so hurry up.”
She also uses special pliers with a round edge on top and a flat edge on the bottom to avoid fracturing the glass.
“Everything must fit perfectly. There’s no room for error in stained glass. It’s better to cut too big than too little. Little nails hold this lamp together, so when you solder it, it will fit nicely. If you’re not careful, you can solder them together. Lead bends easily, but it shrinks in time.”
What might seem like a great deal from Mexico might not be because “they don’t solder the front and back for stability. They only solder the front. They’re not crafted well. We like to work at 1,100 degrees. Nine-hundred degrees is not quite hot enough, so soldering irons you get at the hardware store are not quite enough. You really need a stained glass iron to get that extra-hot temperature. A lot of people use leadless solder, which is a little more expensive. The solder I use is 40 percent lead.”
A “sweet cutter” can cost $45.