For most of us, stained glass and churches go hand in hand. The medium’s nectar luminosity and capacity for narrative imagery have long been used to invoke the divine.
But where we may see a display of devotion, New Haven’s founders—English Puritans who in 1639 organized the First Church of Christ, now known as Center Church on the Green—saw an expression of blasphemy. They took seriously the second commandment, as stated in Exodus 20:4 of the Geneva Bible that guided them: “Thou shalt make thee no graven image, neither any similitude of things that are in heaven above, neither that are in the earth beneath, nor that are in the waters under the earth.”
Accordingly, Puritans believed their Roman Catholic and High Church Anglican contemporaries, who favored narrative stained glass, were in grave error. And this was an error Puritans were all too happy to correct when they were in power, specifically during the reign of Edward VI and the Protectorate of history’s most famous Puritan, Oliver Cromwell. During these periods, destruction of stained glass was routine.
When, in the interim, some Puritans fled to New England, they stayed true to the letter of Exodus, building very simple meetinghouses that looked more like large barns than the parish churches and cathedrals they’d left behind. Situated in the geographic center of the settlement, these structures also served as the seat of government, hosting not only prayer meetings throughout the week and day-long services on Sundays but also town meetings and trials.
Although simplicity was the rule of the day, Puritan churches still managed to compete for aesthetic glory. Windows—unstained, of course—became the primary means of displaying the affluence of a congregation. A congregation with a meetinghouse that had many large windows demonstrated it could afford not only the required glass and craftsmanship but also the fuel to heat the building.
In the following century, change—but not too much—was afoot. The Puritan settlers’ descendants came to call themselves “Congregationalists,” and their meetinghouses evolved in style, coming to resemble the structures we still find on many of New England’s town commons today: large white buildings with three doors and a tall steeple. Yet the congregations that met inside them continued to reject iconography–including even plain crosses, let alone stained-glass windows.
So it was that Congregationalists entered and journeyed through the early part of the 19th century with the same iconoclastic sensibilities as the Pilgrim founders. But as that century entered its twilight, stained glass was on the verge of a revival. Most of what had passed for stained glass during this period was simply glass to which an artist had applied opaque paints, the colors on rather than in the glass, producing a much duller effect.
In 1880 in New York City, competitors John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany invented processes for incorporating opalescent glass into their window designs—magnificent mosaics of multi-colored glass that could rival even medieval Europe’s. Tiffany, a talented painter and scion of Tiffany & Co., had wealth, acumen and connections that La Farge, who was nonetheless a success in his own right, did not. Tiffany leveraged these advantages to form the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, later called Tiffany Studios, which dominated stained-glass manufacturing at the turn of the century.
Meanwhile, due to factors including the development of liberal theology, the opulent style of the Gilded Age and the competition presented by the large and growing Roman Catholic population with its love of art and pageantry, mainline Protestant mores and tastes were again changing, only much more dramatically this time. Many Congregational churches in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began to construct Gothic-style church buildings that resembled the very parish churches and cathedrals their founders had fled. Many of these buildings included chancels, stone altars, bejeweled crosses and, yes, even stained-glass windows.
Other Congregational churches, such as Center Church, wished to retain but augment their 18th- and early 19th-century meetinghouses with the latest and greatest in stained glass, typically facilitated by wealthy and devout members of the congregation. And yet these windows often declined to feature the Biblical iconography one would find in Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches, instead opting for historical scenes that spoke to the congregation’s identity.
On November 11, 1894, Center Church installed the Trowbridge Memorial Window above its chancel. The window, a Tiffany creation depicting New Haven’s and Center Church’s first minister, John Davenport, preaching from a boulder under an oak tree on the first Sunday after the settlers’ arrival in April 1638, was given to the congregation by E. Hayes Trowbridge in memory of his father, Ezekiel. (E. Hayes Trowbridge had, perhaps, attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Tiffany Studios exhibited its sensational “Tiffany Chapel.”) Of note is the way in which the window conveys the social diversity of the early congregation, depicting a farmer, a student, a mother with child, a soldier, a single woman and New Haven Colony Governor Theophilus Eaton holding a rifle, one of only two known depictions of a firearm in a Tiffany window.
At Tiffany, the window and the accompanying liturgical items—the pulpit, communion table, chairs and moldings, all of which remain to this day and may comprise the most intact Tiffany chancel collection in existence—were designed by Joseph Lauber, a German immigrant who, according to Alastair Duncan’s Tiffany Windows (1982), “headed his own studio before joining Tiffany in the early 1890s.” The window is based on The First Sabbath, a painting by New Haven-based Hudson River School artist Thomas Prichard Rossiter, albeit “rearranged to suit the limited space available.”
The great reception of this window by the congregation led to the commission and installation of nine other stained-glass windows, at least five of which were Tiffany, between 1898 and 1904. Amazingly given the esteem with which we now view it, Tiffany glass fell out of style not long after. In 1932, driven both by changing tastes as well as the Great Depression, Tiffany Studios filed for bankruptcy, and by the middle years of the century, Tiffany windows were widely considered gaudy and routinely removed and destroyed without objection.
In 1960, at the tail end of the Colonial Revival movement and roughly two decades before the resurgence of academic and popular interest in Tiffany glass, Center Church undertook a restoration of its meetinghouse intended to return it to its original character. The stained-glass windows at the sides of the meetinghouse were, to quote a contemporary pamphlet, “not in harmony, many people thought, with the simplicity of a Puritan meetinghouse.” Accordingly, these windows were removed. (Today, you can find three of them in the Buley Library of Southern Connecticut State University, with three more at Pitts Chapel Unified Free Will Baptist Church in Newhallville.) Yet, to quote the same pamphlet, “the magnificent John Davenport window was retained, not only for its loveliness but because a plain window back of the pulpit would be trying to the eyes. This window is, in a sense, the focal point of much of our worship.”
Today, Center Church’s worship services are held Sunday mornings at 11. But the westerly window’s focal power peaks later in the day, when tree-dappled sun may find the leafy arching tree that caps the window design itself. Below it, the light wells and surges in a man’s golden cape, a woman’s emerald dress, a child’s auburn hair. Davenport, his fair skin a contrast to the canopy behind him, clasps a Bible to his chest with his left hand and points his right index finger upward, as if to say, “Don’t worship us, your history, but rather God in Heaven.”
Davenport, at least, would have approved of that message, if not its graven messenger.
Written by Nicholas Mignanelli, who serves as moderator and historian of Center Church on the Green, and Dan Mims. Images 1, 2 and 5 feature the Trowbridge Window. Images 2, 3 and 4 feature other elements of Center Church’s Tiffany chancel, including the pulpit (detail, image 3) and chairs (image 4).
