Nearly 120 drawings reveal how Louis Comfort Tiffany’s celebrated stained glass, lamps, mosaics, and interiors moved from fragile ideas on paper to enduring works of American decorative art.
Before the stained-glass window glowed, before the lamp illuminated a room, before a Tiffany interior transformed a mansion or public building, there was a drawing.
This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art turns its attention to that often-overlooked stage of the creative process with Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany, opening October 22, 2026, and continuing through February 7, 2027 at The Met Fifth Avenue.
The exhibition brings together nearly 120 works, primarily from The Met’s collection, alongside selected loans, to explore the design process behind some of the most celebrated creations associated with Tiffany’s studios. It is the first major exhibition devoted specifically to the design drawings produced for Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Gilded Age creations.
Rather than treating the drawings as secondary material, The Met places them at the center of the story.
The result is a different portrait of Tiffany: not simply the celebrated name attached to luminous objects, but the leader of a large and collaborative design enterprise populated by artists, designers, artisans, émigrés, and women whose contributions were often left uncredited.
Before Tiffany Glass, There Was Paper
Tiffany is perhaps most closely associated with stained glass and the distinctive lamps that became symbols of American Art Nouveau.
But the objects began much earlier.
A drawing could establish the composition of a window, determine the placement of figures and ornament, explore the relationship between color and light, or communicate an ambitious interior scheme to a client.
The Met describes the exhibition’s drawings as ranging from quick working sketches to highly finished watercolor presentation drawings. Together, they provide an unusually intimate view into the stages through which an idea developed into a finished commission.
Some of the works document projects that survive today.
Others record objects and interiors that have been altered, damaged, destroyed, or never realized.
In those cases, the drawings become something more than preparatory documents.
They become historical evidence.
The Creative Machine Behind Tiffany
The phrase “Tiffany Studios” can easily suggest a single artistic vision.
The exhibition complicates that assumption.
The Met emphasizes that virtually everything produced in Tiffany’s workshops emerged from a collaborative process. Tiffany supplied artistic direction and ambition, but a large network of designers and craftspeople translated ideas into finished objects and environments.
Among the figures highlighted are Frederick Wilson, Jacob Holzer, Agnes Northrop, Clara Driscoll, and Julia Munson.
Their presence changes the way the Tiffany story can be understood.
The exhibition draws attention particularly to women and émigré designers who contributed substantially to the studio’s output, even though historical accounts have often placed Tiffany himself at the center of the narrative.
The drawings make collaboration visible.
A signature may belong to Tiffany.
But the creative process was considerably larger.
Agnes Northrop and the Women of Tiffany Studios
One of the most important aspects of the exhibition is its attention to women designers.
Agnes Northrop was a particularly significant figure within Tiffany Studios, known for her work on stained-glass windows and designs featuring natural subjects.
The Met’s accompanying scholarship also places Northrop within a wider network of women who helped shape the visual language of Tiffany’s workshops.
The emphasis is important because the Gilded Age’s decorative arts were often presented through the names of prominent male designers, entrepreneurs, and patrons.
Yet the actual making of these environments depended upon numerous artists whose work was collaborative and, in many cases, insufficiently credited.
Designing the Gilded Age gives those contributions greater visibility.
The drawing becomes a way of recovering authorship.
From Domestic Interiors to Sacred Spaces
The exhibition is organized thematically across three galleries.
One explores designs for domestic interiors.
Another examines ecclesiastical settings.
The third focuses on public and commercial commissions, alongside Tiffany’s innovations in lighting.
Together, these categories demonstrate the extraordinary range of the Tiffany studios.
The work was not confined to individual decorative objects.
Tiffany’s designers helped shape entire environments.
Mansions could become immersive compositions of stained glass, mosaics, furniture, textiles, and lighting.
Religious buildings could be transformed through carefully coordinated windows and architectural decoration.
Public and commercial spaces could similarly use decorative design to construct an atmosphere of prestige and modernity.
In this sense, Tiffany’s work anticipated a contemporary understanding of interior design as total experience.
The room itself could become the artwork.
The Drawing Beside the Finished Object
One of the exhibition’s most compelling strategies is to place selected loans—including stained-glass windows, lamps, mosaics, and decorative objects—in dialogue with their corresponding drawings.
This allows visitors to compare intention with realization.
A watercolor drawing can appear delicate and almost weightless.
The finished stained glass may be monumental.
The drawing records color through pigment.
The window transforms color through light.
The distance between the two reveals something fundamental about design: an object is not simply translated from paper into material.
It changes along the way.
Glass, metal, stone, fabric, wood, light, scale, architecture, and craftsmanship all alter the original idea.
The Met’s exhibition makes that transformation visible.
Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria
One of the exhibition’s major moments is the reunion of Tiffany Studios’ Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria, created in 1911, with its original wisteria transoms.
The monumental stained-glass window comes from the Chrysler Museum of Art, while the transoms were recently discovered in a private home in Arizona.
According to The Met, their reunion makes it possible to see the ensemble together for the first time in at least half a century.
The story is almost cinematic.
A major decorative work becomes separated from its architectural context.
Its components move through different histories.
Then, decades later, pieces of the original design are found and reunited.
The exhibition turns that rediscovery into an opportunity to reconsider how Tiffany’s environments were originally conceived.
The Lost Gilded Age
Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the drawings is that many depict things that no longer exist.
Some buildings have disappeared.
Some interiors have been remodeled.
Some objects were damaged or destroyed.
Some proposed designs were never produced.
The drawings therefore become a kind of visual archive of an American landscape that is partly lost.
They preserve not only what Tiffany’s studios made, but what they imagined.
That distinction matters.
Design history is often written through surviving objects.
But an unrealized design can reveal ambitions that the finished object never communicates.
A drawing can show an alternative path.
It can document a proposal rejected by a client.
It can preserve a building before renovation.
It can record a decorative scheme that disappeared decades ago.
At The Met, these fragile sheets of paper become witnesses to a much larger history.
The Gilded Age and the Luxury Economy
Tiffany’s success was inseparable from the extraordinary economic transformation of late-19th- and early-20th-century America.
The Gilded Age produced unprecedented concentrations of wealth, enormous private residences, expanding cultural institutions, new civic buildings, and an increasingly sophisticated market for luxury goods.
Design became one of the ways that wealth could be made visible.
A stained-glass window was decoration—but it was also architecture, technology, craftsmanship, and status.
A Tiffany lamp was lighting—but it was also an expression of taste.
A complete interior could communicate the identity and cultural ambitions of its owner.
The Met places Tiffany’s work within precisely this environment, connecting the studio’s output to the economic and cultural expansion of the period.
The result is a more complicated picture of decorative art.
Beauty was part of the equation.
So were commerce, technology, social ambition, and industrial production.
Conservation as Discovery
The exhibition also highlights something that museum visitors rarely see: conservation.
The Met holds what it describes as the largest collection of Tiffany design drawings anywhere, and the exhibition grows from decades of conservation and research into these fragile works on paper.
Many of the drawings have never previously been studied in depth.
Conservation has allowed details, colors, and material qualities that had become obscured to emerge again.
This makes the exhibition partly an exhibition about looking.
Looking at Tiffany.
Looking at the drawings.
And looking at the evidence that conservation can reveal.
Digital and interpretive components will further explain discoveries made through the preservation process.
Tiffany Beyond the Tiffany Name
The most important revelation of Designing the Gilded Age may be that “Tiffany” was never simply one person’s artistic output.
It was a system.
A studio.
A network of designers.
A manufacturing operation.
A commercial enterprise.
A community of artists and craftspeople.
And a response to the cultural ambitions of a rapidly changing America.
The drawings reveal that complexity.
They show how an image traveled from an initial sketch to a presentation drawing, from a client’s approval to a workshop, and finally into glass, metal, mosaic, textile, wood, or architectural space.
That process may sound familiar to contemporary designers.
But at the scale of Tiffany’s ambitions, it was transformative.
The Blueprint Becomes the Artwork
In New York, where the Gilded Age created many of the institutions and architectural landmarks that still define the city, the exhibition carries a particular resonance.
The Met itself was founded in 1870, during the same period of economic and cultural transformation that allowed Tiffany’s studios to flourish.
More than a century later, the museum is bringing the hidden beginnings of that design culture into view.
The drawings may be smaller and more fragile than the stained-glass windows they inspired.
But they contain something equally important.
Possibility.
Before the finished object existed, there was an idea on paper.
And in Designing the Gilded Age, that idea becomes the artwork worth looking at.
Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693, from October 22, 2026, through February 7, 2027. Admission is included with Museum admission.
