Lecture, Frederic Crowninshield: A Renaissance Man in the Gilded Age

Gilded Age America required an army of talented mural and stained-glass artists to create decorative confections. Foremost among them, Frederic Crowninshield (1845–1918) rose to meet this challenge, and his career sheds light on what came to be known as the American Renaissance. Like his contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge, Crowninshield devoted much of his energy to designing murals and stained glass windows. But he was also a successful painter, teacher, and author. In this lecture, authors Gertrude deG. Wilmers and Julie L. Sloan offer the first full account of Crowninshield’s life and work, situating his career in the context of patronage, class, and art with an analysis of his stained glass, mural painting, oil, and watercolor.

Gertrude deG. Wilmers received her doctorate in art history from Columbia University, where her dissertation on Flemish Baroque painting earned her a degree with distinction. She has enjoyed a rich and varied career in the art world, including a stint as a special research associate authentifying works of art for the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), and planning and organizing activities for children at Les Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. She is the author of several monographs and many scholarly articles, several of which have been published in the IFAR Journal. She has lectured widely in many locations, including Emmanuel Church, Salve Regina University, The Victorian Society of New York City, and the Gallery at Hastings-on-Hudson.

Julie L. Sloan, a stained-glass consultant in North Adams, MA, is the author of Conservation
of Stained Glass in America and many articles on stained glass history and conservation. She
has been an adjunct professor of historic preservation at Columbia University since 1985.
As an appraiser of American stained glass, Ms. Sloan’s conservation projects include Saint
Thomas Episcopal Church, New York; H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston; Harvard
University’s Memorial Hall; Princeton University’s Chapel, and the State Houses of Connecticut,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Her conservation and research projects have won
many awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel Kress
Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and the Arts & Crafts Fund.

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