Smith Museum of Stained Glass, Chicago

A friend recently sent me an article of great interest. It was announcing the opening of The Smith Museum of Stained Glass at Navy Pier in Chicago. The museum opened on February 11 and I had the opportunity to visit there February 20.

This is the first museum in the United States dedicated solely to stained glass.  The collection wonderful! It is permanently displayed all along an 800-foot section of the terraces of Navy Pier’s Festival Hall. They expect to eventually have 150 windows in the collection and seem to have most of that number now.

Its exhibits, both religious and secular, are divided into four sections: Victorian, Prairie, Modern and Contemporary. The windows were designed by such well-known artists such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge.

Most of the windows were originally installed in the Chicago area and were designed by prominent local, national and European studios. Buildings that formerly housed some of these pieces are the Wright’s Coonley Pool House, Sullivan’s windows from the Chicago Stock Exchange and Auditorium Theatre.

The windows represent the time period from 1870 on. This was a time of great building in Chicago as it was recovering from the Great Chicago Fire. Chicago’s industry attracted great numbers of immigrants who decorated their homes and sacred places with stained glass following traditional European styles. Between 1871 and 1930, thousands of stained glass windows were installed in Chicago buildings.

This resulted in Chicago becoming a world center for stained glass. Eventually over 50 stained glass studios existed in Chicago.  Although Chicago is no longer an important working center for stained glass, glasswork was so lavishly installed during its 60-year heyday that the city is still a great living museum.

Chicago studios produced stained glass work for a great variety of installations including churches, mansions, middle class homes, schools, libraries, hotels, theaters, restaurants, private clubs, railroad stations and even railroad cars.

According to authors and researchers Ernie and Florence Frueh, authors of the book Chicago Stained Glass "It is doubtful that any city in the United States used stained glass more lavishly than Chicago did during the period from the Great Fire of 1871 to the Great Depression of the 1930s." Chicago certainly seems a quite fitting place to house America’s first stained glass museum. 

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