Topline
A nature-inspired Tiffany Studios stained glass window that broke records when it sold more than 20 years ago has done it again by almost doubling its expected sale price to fetch $12.48 million, becoming the most expensive Tiffany piece ever auctioned.
Key Facts
The Danner Memorial Window, a 16-foot-high leaded window previously owned by billionaire Alan Gerry, sold in a Sotheby’s auction Monday night to an anonymous buyer.
It shattered the previous auction record for a Tiffany Studios piece of $3.37 million (a Pond Lily Lamp sold for that price at Christie’s in 2018).
It marks the second time the Danner window broke a Tiffany Studios record—it sold for $2 million in 2000 and was, at the time, the most expensive piece ever from the creator.
The window, which depicts blooming trees and a rolling river in vibrant colors, was made by Louis Comfort Tiffany and designer Agnes Northrop in 1913 as a tribute to John and Terressa Danner, founding members of the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio.
The piece was called the “most significant and valuable Tiffany Studios work ever offered at auction” by Sotheby’s and was sold from the personal collection of Gerry, who founded and sold Cablevision Industries to Time Warner for almost $3 billion in the late 1990s.
The work was expected to sell for between $5 million and $7 million.
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Key Background
Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose father founded Tiffany & Co., produced stained glass in New York between 1878 and 1933. His creations, most famously windows, lamps and flower cones, were sold on the main floor of the Tiffany & Co. store on Fifth Avenue in New York, as well as in London and Paris stores. Original Tiffany Studios pieces are highly collectable today. Some 3,800 original Tiffany windows remain in the United States today, including at churches in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York and in the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The Danner Memorial Window depicts fruit-laden trees on the banks of a river with vibrant red, orange, blue, green and purple hues. Sotheby’s said the work is comparable to famous counterparts like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Autumn Landscape Window and the Hartwell Memorial Window at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Forbes Valuation
Gerry was ranked as the 2,152nd richest person in the world as of Tuesday with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.
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