Professor Butter Beard and Agnes Northrop’s Tiffany “Garden Landscape”
“I consider myself a stained-glass window. And this is how I live my life. Closing no doors and covering no windows; I am the multi-colored glass with light filtering through me, in many different shades. Allowing light to shed and fall into many many hues. My job is not to direct anything, but only to filter into many colors. My answer is destiny and my guide is joy. And there you have me.” – C. Joybell
In 1912, Sarah B. Cochran commissioned Louis C. Tiffany to create a stained-glass window for Linden Hall, the grand neo-Tudor mansion she was building in Dawson, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.
But, gentle reader, let’s back up to enjoy her “Bridgerton” season. Born Sarah B. Moore in 1857 to poor farmers in rural Pennsylvania, she took a domestic service position in the home of Clarissa and James Cochran. James Cochran, a self-made man, was an early pioneer in the coke and coal business in the Connellsville region, an area that supplied the majority of the nation’s coke – a coal byproduct that was the crucial ingredient for the iron and steel industries.
It was in the Cochran home that Sarah met and later married Philip G. Cochran, the eldest son, in 1879. Philip joined the family business and assumed control of much of it when his father died in 1894. Unfortunately, he followed his father to the grave just five years later. In his will, he gave Sarah (now 44 years old) full control of his extensive coal and coke interests. She moved ahead to found additional companies and tripled the business’s profits in just ten years. By 1912, Sarah Cochran, dubbed the nation’s “coal queen,” was one the wealthiest women in the eastern United States.
Cochran’s substantial fortune gave her the resources to build a tremendous thirty-five room mansion on eight hundred acres, which she named Linden Hall after the linden trees that lined the driveway on the property. The Hall was completed in two years at a cost of over $2 million dollars – equivalent to approximately $144 million today. And to top her grand staircase that rose in a majestic curve over the entrance, she commissioned Louis C. Tiffany to design the “most elegant garden landscape window ever conceived.”
The “Garden Landscape” window is ascribed to Agnes F. Northrop based on the signed watercolor design submitted to Mr. Tiffany. According to Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Metropolitan Museum’s Tiffany curator, “Northrop is one of the must unsung stained-glass designers of the late 19th century and one of the numerous women who played critical roles in the design and fabrication of the art of Louis Tiffany in many media at a time when there were few opportunities for women to earn a livelihood and even fewer opportunities for their talents to acknowledged.” Northrop worked for Tiffany’s firm for fifty years, virtually her entire career, as an independent woman with a studio of her own.
Sarah Cochran had personally met with Tiffany to request the subject of the landscape window, suggesting her own planned gardens at Linden Hall. The three-part window offers a long vista through tall pines flanking a central fountain amidst a profusion of flowers—pink and blue hydrangeas, poppies, and nasturtiums. The two side panels depict, on the left, foxglove and peonies, and, on the right, hollyhocks, exquisitely rendered in stained glass. These were subjects much favored by Agnes Northrop and the American Impressionist painters and aligned with the comforting nostalgia of the “old-fashioned garden.”
Northrop achieved the extraordinarily illusionistic quality by manipulating the varied textures, lush colors, and light effects made possible only with Tiffany’s special Favrile glass made at his Corona (Queens) furnaces. The final window exhibits some especially innovative and unusual techniques in stained glass. The careful selection of the ingenious glass and the cutting into often impossible shapes of literally thousands of pieces of glass was done by Tiffany’s skilled artisans, who were also largely women. According to Frelinghuysen, the final vista is a masterpiece, “merging imagery with chromatic light, presenting a beautiful garden view, perennially at its peak.”
A spring garden at its perennial peak – that just sounds like a “Bridgerton Heaven” after this century-long winter from which we are finally emerging. I find myself daydreaming of sipping lemon-dropped Earl Grey from a porcelain cup while Nels and the spring bees perform an interpretive waltz among the blooming cyan and violet hollyhocks. Within seconds, that vision transforms into a platter of freshly baked Danish filled with vanilla bean cheesecake and a spoonful of homemade blueberry jam.
And then, in strolls lavishly be-wigged Queen Charlotte, her five Pomeranians, and mile-high towers of bonbons. Oh dear.
Professor Butter Beard’s Easy-Peasy Blueberry Cheesecake Danish
12 Danish
One package store-bought Puff Pastry Sheets
Cheesecake filling:
8 ounces cream cheese
4 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 large egg
Zest of one lime
1 tsp vanilla paste
Dash of fine sea salt
Additional:
1 large egg for egg wash
12 tsp of your favorite jam – I prefer blueberry
1) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2) For the cream cheese filling: Add all the ingredients to a food processor and process until smooth. Scrape the filling into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and chill until ready to use.
3) Unroll one sheet of puff pastry, dust lightly with flour, and cut into six square, roughly 4” by 4”.
4) Place one square in front of you so it is shaped like a diamond. Fold it in half so it becomes a triangle. Using a sharp paring knife (or scissors), make a cut from the base of the triangle to ½” below the top point. Make the same cut on the other side of the triangle. Unfold the square. Fold cut left side over the center and place the point in line with the opposite inside point. Repeat with the right side. Evenly place the six shaped doughs on the first baking sheet. Repeat with the second sheet of dough and place them on the second baking sheet.
5) Brush the edges of the Danish with a egg wash (one egg whisked with 1 Tbsp water), leaving the center square unwashed. Place a Tbsp of the cheesecake filling in the square and top with a tsp of your jam.
6) Bake one sheet at a time for 18-20 minutes until fully puffed and nicely browned. Remove the Danish to a wire rack to cool at least to room temperature before eating.
(Note – For a sheen, brush the baked Danish with a thin layer of simple syrup)
