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Lot Essay
The Jay Morton house, in the North Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, has been thought to be the sole construction of architect Henry Webster Tomlinson (1869-1942) for many years because he was the architect of record on the building permit, recorded in the press in September 1900.[1] Tomlinson had an office on the eleventh floor of Steinway Hall in downtown Chicago, the same space occupied by Frank Lloyd Wright and a group of like-minded architects that called themselves The Eighteen. The group included Marion Mahony (later Griffin, 1871-1961), who was also Wright’s first employee, hired in 1895.
Four months after getting the building permit for the Morton house, Tomlinson joined Wright in a short-lived partnership that lasted from about January 1901 until about March 1902, during which time the Morton house was under construction. The partnership notice in Construction News stated that the studio was in Oak Park and the business office in Steinway Hall (although Wright still kept an office in Steinway Hall, his burgeoning business was largely housed in Oak Park).[2] Grant Carpenter Manson, whose book, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (1958), was a seminal early investigation into Wright’s Prairie period, interviewed Tomlinson before his death about their relationship. Tomlinson stated that he took care of business correspondence and construction supervision, while Wright’s office did the designing and drafting.[3] He also stated that “credit for ‘design’ of houses built during our association is entirely due to Mr. Wright.”[4] Tomlinson was involved with several of Wright’s houses. His name appears on drawings and city permit filings for Wright’s houses for E. Arthur Davenport in River Forest; F. B. Henderson in La Grange, IL; and William Fricke and Frank Thomas in Oak Park, IL, all built in 1901. He was also involved in the construction of the B. Harley Bradley and Warren Hickox houses in Kankakee, IL (both 1901), and several unbuilt projects.[5]
The Morton house itself is largely unremarkable but has a few elements, like the ornamentation of the porches, that relate it to Wright’s Alison Harlan house (1892, demolished), located a few blocks away, that suggest Wright’s involvement. Construction extended into 1901. Since the leaded-glass windows are usually one of the last elements installed in a house (saving them from breakage during construction), the Morton windows most likely date to the period of the partnership.
After Wright and Tomlinson parted ways in 1902, Tomlinson went on to design several other houses in the Midwest, although most of his work was in civic structures and apartment buildings. He used leaded glass in simple designs for some of his homes. For his 1906 house for John Howard at 710 E. Prospect Ave. in Lake Bluff, IL, the windows have vertical leadlines spaced to divide the window into five vertical strips. Each leadline is interrupted by two small diamonds, then bisected by a trio of horizontal leadlines at the top. They are vaguely Wrightian but not creative or ornate. An unidentified house in Glencoe built in 1910 was intended to have “art glass,” but it is not known whether it actually did or what it looked like.[6] His most interesting windows were for 618 Maple Avenue in Lake Bluff, IL, designed for Annie and Minnie Sherman in 1910. The house, still extant, retains its original leaded glass, illustrated by Vanessa Balbach Clarke in her small monograph about Tomlinson. Although interesting as the work of a Prairie School architect, the most ornate group is a watered-down version of the Bradley house living room windows. The others are not particularly inventive, showing none of the ingenuity of the Morton windows. It is especially noteworthy that these most interesting of Tomlinson’s windows were created a decade after the Morton windows, with nothing of interest in between.
So that leaves the question, are the Morton windows by Frank Lloyd Wright? One element of Wright‘s genius was his ability to transform the existing norms of architecture into wholly new ones based on his own radical ideas. One artform in which this can be traced is his leaded glass, or light screens, as he called them. During the 1890s, he struggled to find his voice in the two-dimensional patterning of leaded glass. Coming out of his training with Joseph Lyman Silsbee in 1887, in his earliest bootlegged houses (so called because they were done while he was employed by Louis Sullivan from 1888 to 1893), the designs were strongly rooted in simple American Renaissance styles. This includes the diamond-paned windows of his own house in Oak Park, IL. As he explored his own voice, his leaded-glass designs quickly evolved into complex linear patterns employing all kinds of geometric shapes, including arcs, triangles, kite-shapes, and rectangles, often all in the same window. This cacophony of lines, arcs, and angles would soon quiet down into designs that grew from the building itself, but Wright was still working that out when the Morton windows were designed.
Best known of the pre-Prairie windows is probably the dining room hemicycle of the William Winslow house (River Forest, 1893), an extravaganza of leaves. Less well known but no less interesting are the arched third-floor windows of the Warren McArthur and C. E. Roberts houses (Chicago, 1892, and Oak Park, 1896, respectively). Several were apparently never installed in houses. One was the small display window he made for the American Luxfer Prism Company around 1897. That window remained in his own collection where it was heavily damaged in one of the fires that plagued his homes, but it still survives. Two others were published by Robert Spencer, Jr., in his important 1900 article on Wright’s work in Architectural Review, the first time it saw a national audience.[7] One was for the Chauncey Williams house in River Forest, the other for C. E. Roberts. The reproduction quality of the magazine was not very high, so details of these windows are hard to make out, including, of course, their color. The windows are not known to have been installed in their houses and are now lost. Another unusual design was realized only in a drawing but is now very familiar because it has been reproduced so often in scarves and other merchandise. It is of water lilies with almond-shaped leaves and flower petals against a rectilinear background (FLWF 0912-001). The latest of this group are the buffet doors for the Warren McArthur house (Chicago, 1902).
The Morton windows fit into this anomalous period of Wright’s pre-Prairie creativity. Their elements and motifs can be found in other work coming out of his studio at this time, by his hand and possibly that of Marion Mahony, both in glass and in graphic design. The materials and craftsmanship relate to those in other windows of the period, made when Tomlinson was involved with Wright’s commissions.
As noted above, Tomlinson was involved with the building of the Davenport, Fricke, and Henderson houses. Their windows are all similar, possibly based on a Japanese bamboo curtain effect illustrated by Edward Sylvester Morse in his book, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886), which Wright owned. The curtain was made of long bamboo beads interspersed with small black beads at regular intervals on a horizontal axis. The windows have long rectangular sections of clear glass interspersed with white squares on a horizontal axis. Wright was fascinated by Japanese elements and continued to use a similar bamboo-curtain motif in his windows for the first Francis Little house (1902), some of the windows for the William Martin house (1902), the bookcase doors in his Oak Park office (1903-04), and the Darwin D. Martin Gardener’s Cottage (1905). The pattern became a drafting standard in the studio and is found in the renderings published In the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910 for the William H. Winslow, K. C. DeRhodes, C. H. McAfee, and H. J. Ullman houses.[8] The Butler’s Pantry cabinet doors from the Morton house are of a similar simple design with predominantly straight vertical lines and horizontal lead lines, but no colored squares, more similar to the window Wright created for the maid’s room in the Susan Lawrence Dana house (Springfield, IL, 1902-1904).[9] They are also similar to windows made by Tomlinson for the Sherman house.
The design of the main entrance transom window bears a marked similarity to the windows of the Gerald Mahony house, built in Elkhart, IN, in 1907 by Marion Mahony, his sister, who was an important contributor to Wright’s Oak Park Studio. Mahony probably also designed the windows for Wright’s K. C. DeRhodes house (South Bend, IN, 1906), which have similar maple-seed forms.[10] She also designed windows for several of her own buildings, including the Mahony house, which features small, pointed devices made of two acute triangles that intersect at their wide ends, looking like abstracted maple seeds. The motifs in the Morton transom are formed the same way. The pendants from the paired triangles are also similar to the Mahony windows, with parallel lines intersecting another triangle.
The windows from the living room mantel of the Morton house also feature intersecting acute triangles as well as a run of leaf forms, chevron devices, triangles, and rectangles. This is a busy pattern with many of the elements that Wright would later separate and confine to individual designs: chevrons in the early Prairie years, rectangles in the later Prairie years, and triangles after 1911. Most unusual aspect is the presence of the leaves. Although Wright’s windows are often thought to be abstracted floriforms, they rarely included such complex curves, except in houses of the late 1890s. The aforementioned windows for the Winslow, McArthur, and Roberts, as well as the drawing for the waterlily window, are the exceptions. Of additional interest is the similarity of this design to the plates Wright drew for The House Beautiful, the book by William C. Gannett that he and client William Winslow produced in 1896. Almost every plate has passages of leaves like the one in the window, especially the title page, where they fill the spaces between the figures at the bottom and between the vertical motifs at the top. Significantly, portions of these borders also illustrated Spencer’s Architectural Review article.
The window from the primary bedroom closet also looks like an exploded view of part of The House Beautiful borders. Additionally, the small arrowhead shapes relate to another Wright window that could have come from the pages of The House Beautiful: the buffet doors of the Warren McArthur house, done in 1902 after the house was completed. It features the same arrowhead shape, a form not found in Wright’s later windows because it can’t be made by drafting tools alone. The center band of the Morton window with its dark triangles on the edges is also from The House Beautiful.
The largest of the Morton windows, from the stair landing, is by far the most elaborate pattern. Like the living room mantel windows, it is a amalgam of rectangles, triangles, diamonds, lozenges, and arrowheads. While more rectilinear than The House Beautiful borders, it is an evolution of them, more geometrically abstracted. Compositionally it relates to one of the windows illustrated in Spencer’s article, that for the Chauncey Williams house. The window appeared in two photographs (although in the second it is barely visible due to the flare of light), indicating that it was in fact produced.[11] It appears to have been roughly the same size as the Morton stair landing window. Like the Morton window, it is an assemblage of geometric shapes. Both windows feature two mirror-image columnar designs. Those in the Williams window are topped by circles, whereas the Morton columns are topped by rhomboids and triangles, almost thistle-like in appearance. As Wright’s window vocabulary evolved, the types of shapes used would resolve into a coherent whole, and the Morton window is a step further along that pathway than the Roberts window.
The double-column composition also appeared in the windows of the Frank Thomas house, worked on by both architects. It was initially referred to in the press and the building plans as the James Rogers house (Rogers was Thomas’ father-in-law). The use of glass in the Thomas house was extensive, and the color palette had evolved to tones of gold and amber only. At the top of the Thomas device are three long triangles pointing downward into the cluster of tiny squares that foreshadow the Darwin D. Martin house windows (Buffalo, NY, 1903-1905). Below the devices is a narrow version of the Edward Sylvester Morse beaded bamboo curtain, similar to the Morton window but simplified and clarified.
Of course, neither Wright nor Tomlinson actually fabricated their windows. The influence of the stained-glass craftspeople cannot be underestimated. They would have provided input on how glass behaves, what types of cuts can and cannot be made, available colors of glass, and sizes and types of came. However, it is difficult to know exactly what they provided in terms of design advice. It is not known who made the Morton windows, although it was probably Giannini & Hilgart in Chicago. Orlando Giannini, an artist and painter, decorated the bedrooms and playroom of Wright’s home with paintings of Native Americans and genies. They produced the windows for Davenport house and the Thomas house.
The Morton windows are made of lead came, not zinc, which is not unusual in this transitional period of Wright’s work. Although zinc came had been invented in 1893 by the Chicago Metallic Corp., Wright was just beginning to use it by 1900. Its availability and potential was probably suggested by his stained-glass makers. The Davenport windows and Bradley windows were made completely in lead came. The Thomas windows used both metals. The Henderson and Fricke houses’ windows were of zinc.
The colored glass used in Wright’s windows did not encompass a broad palette and it too evolved as his career progressed. In the 1890s, most of it was clear. As the Prairie style developed, he favored ambers and mossy greens. The ambers are there already in the Morton windows, although the pale green in the stair-landing window did not reappear until the J. Kibben Ingalls house (River Forest, IL, 1909). The small bits of bright red glass in the stair landing and living room windows appear to match that used in the B. Harley Bradley house. Different tones of white were always a favorite and comprise a broad selection, so they are difficult to trace from one Wright window to another.
The Morton windows also incorporate reflective gold, a color effect Wright came to love in his windows because it sparkled at night in the home when no daylight illuminated the colored glass. In the Morton windows, this gold is created with fired gold paint, similar to that used to decorate porcelain and mosaic tiles, like those Wright used in the fireplace mosaic of the Joseph Husser house made by Giannini & Hilgart (Chicago, 1899, demolished). Wright used gold paint extensively in the Thomas windows. In later windows, this would be replaced with gold leaf sandwiched between thin pieces of clear glass, which he had first used in the Luxfer Company display window.
[1] American Contractor (September 22, 1900), 21. The permit was also listed in “Building Permits,” Chicago Record (September 19, 1900), 10, and “Building Permits,” Inter-Ocean (September 19, 1900), 9, but no architect was listed in these notices.
[2] Vanessa Balbach Clarke, Henry Webster Tomlinson: An Investigation of the Architect and His Work (privately published, 2018), 12.
[3] Quoted in Lisa D. Schrenk, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 52.
[4] Webster Tomlinson to Grant Manson, typescript letter, January 9, 1940, Grant Carpenter Manson Research Collection, Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park, IL.
[5] Clarke, 1-19; Schrenk, 52, 266n82-84; Grant Carpenter Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1958), 216; William Allin Storrer, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54, 56, 63, 64; “Chicago,” Construction News 12 (October 5, 1890), 669. The two also created plans and designs for several unrealized houses, including the Victor Metzger house (Sault St. Marie, 1901).
[6] Clarke, 32, citing “News of the Week,” Construction News” 30 (November 5, 1910), 25.
[7] Robert Spencer, Jr., “The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Architectural Review 7 (May 1900), 64.
[8] Julie L. Sloan, Light Screens: The Complete Leaded Glass Windows of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), 140.
[9] Sloan, 251.
[10] Sloan, 295
[11] The other photo shows the window behind an easel in Wright’s studio and is reproduced in Schrenk, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Four months after getting the building permit for the Morton house, Tomlinson joined Wright in a short-lived partnership that lasted from about January 1901 until about March 1902, during which time the Morton house was under construction. The partnership notice in Construction News stated that the studio was in Oak Park and the business office in Steinway Hall (although Wright still kept an office in Steinway Hall, his burgeoning business was largely housed in Oak Park).[2] Grant Carpenter Manson, whose book, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (1958), was a seminal early investigation into Wright’s Prairie period, interviewed Tomlinson before his death about their relationship. Tomlinson stated that he took care of business correspondence and construction supervision, while Wright’s office did the designing and drafting.[3] He also stated that “credit for ‘design’ of houses built during our association is entirely due to Mr. Wright.”[4] Tomlinson was involved with several of Wright’s houses. His name appears on drawings and city permit filings for Wright’s houses for E. Arthur Davenport in River Forest; F. B. Henderson in La Grange, IL; and William Fricke and Frank Thomas in Oak Park, IL, all built in 1901. He was also involved in the construction of the B. Harley Bradley and Warren Hickox houses in Kankakee, IL (both 1901), and several unbuilt projects.[5]
The Morton house itself is largely unremarkable but has a few elements, like the ornamentation of the porches, that relate it to Wright’s Alison Harlan house (1892, demolished), located a few blocks away, that suggest Wright’s involvement. Construction extended into 1901. Since the leaded-glass windows are usually one of the last elements installed in a house (saving them from breakage during construction), the Morton windows most likely date to the period of the partnership.
After Wright and Tomlinson parted ways in 1902, Tomlinson went on to design several other houses in the Midwest, although most of his work was in civic structures and apartment buildings. He used leaded glass in simple designs for some of his homes. For his 1906 house for John Howard at 710 E. Prospect Ave. in Lake Bluff, IL, the windows have vertical leadlines spaced to divide the window into five vertical strips. Each leadline is interrupted by two small diamonds, then bisected by a trio of horizontal leadlines at the top. They are vaguely Wrightian but not creative or ornate. An unidentified house in Glencoe built in 1910 was intended to have “art glass,” but it is not known whether it actually did or what it looked like.[6] His most interesting windows were for 618 Maple Avenue in Lake Bluff, IL, designed for Annie and Minnie Sherman in 1910. The house, still extant, retains its original leaded glass, illustrated by Vanessa Balbach Clarke in her small monograph about Tomlinson. Although interesting as the work of a Prairie School architect, the most ornate group is a watered-down version of the Bradley house living room windows. The others are not particularly inventive, showing none of the ingenuity of the Morton windows. It is especially noteworthy that these most interesting of Tomlinson’s windows were created a decade after the Morton windows, with nothing of interest in between.
So that leaves the question, are the Morton windows by Frank Lloyd Wright? One element of Wright‘s genius was his ability to transform the existing norms of architecture into wholly new ones based on his own radical ideas. One artform in which this can be traced is his leaded glass, or light screens, as he called them. During the 1890s, he struggled to find his voice in the two-dimensional patterning of leaded glass. Coming out of his training with Joseph Lyman Silsbee in 1887, in his earliest bootlegged houses (so called because they were done while he was employed by Louis Sullivan from 1888 to 1893), the designs were strongly rooted in simple American Renaissance styles. This includes the diamond-paned windows of his own house in Oak Park, IL. As he explored his own voice, his leaded-glass designs quickly evolved into complex linear patterns employing all kinds of geometric shapes, including arcs, triangles, kite-shapes, and rectangles, often all in the same window. This cacophony of lines, arcs, and angles would soon quiet down into designs that grew from the building itself, but Wright was still working that out when the Morton windows were designed.
Best known of the pre-Prairie windows is probably the dining room hemicycle of the William Winslow house (River Forest, 1893), an extravaganza of leaves. Less well known but no less interesting are the arched third-floor windows of the Warren McArthur and C. E. Roberts houses (Chicago, 1892, and Oak Park, 1896, respectively). Several were apparently never installed in houses. One was the small display window he made for the American Luxfer Prism Company around 1897. That window remained in his own collection where it was heavily damaged in one of the fires that plagued his homes, but it still survives. Two others were published by Robert Spencer, Jr., in his important 1900 article on Wright’s work in Architectural Review, the first time it saw a national audience.[7] One was for the Chauncey Williams house in River Forest, the other for C. E. Roberts. The reproduction quality of the magazine was not very high, so details of these windows are hard to make out, including, of course, their color. The windows are not known to have been installed in their houses and are now lost. Another unusual design was realized only in a drawing but is now very familiar because it has been reproduced so often in scarves and other merchandise. It is of water lilies with almond-shaped leaves and flower petals against a rectilinear background (FLWF 0912-001). The latest of this group are the buffet doors for the Warren McArthur house (Chicago, 1902).
The Morton windows fit into this anomalous period of Wright’s pre-Prairie creativity. Their elements and motifs can be found in other work coming out of his studio at this time, by his hand and possibly that of Marion Mahony, both in glass and in graphic design. The materials and craftsmanship relate to those in other windows of the period, made when Tomlinson was involved with Wright’s commissions.
As noted above, Tomlinson was involved with the building of the Davenport, Fricke, and Henderson houses. Their windows are all similar, possibly based on a Japanese bamboo curtain effect illustrated by Edward Sylvester Morse in his book, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886), which Wright owned. The curtain was made of long bamboo beads interspersed with small black beads at regular intervals on a horizontal axis. The windows have long rectangular sections of clear glass interspersed with white squares on a horizontal axis. Wright was fascinated by Japanese elements and continued to use a similar bamboo-curtain motif in his windows for the first Francis Little house (1902), some of the windows for the William Martin house (1902), the bookcase doors in his Oak Park office (1903-04), and the Darwin D. Martin Gardener’s Cottage (1905). The pattern became a drafting standard in the studio and is found in the renderings published In the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910 for the William H. Winslow, K. C. DeRhodes, C. H. McAfee, and H. J. Ullman houses.[8] The Butler’s Pantry cabinet doors from the Morton house are of a similar simple design with predominantly straight vertical lines and horizontal lead lines, but no colored squares, more similar to the window Wright created for the maid’s room in the Susan Lawrence Dana house (Springfield, IL, 1902-1904).[9] They are also similar to windows made by Tomlinson for the Sherman house.
The design of the main entrance transom window bears a marked similarity to the windows of the Gerald Mahony house, built in Elkhart, IN, in 1907 by Marion Mahony, his sister, who was an important contributor to Wright’s Oak Park Studio. Mahony probably also designed the windows for Wright’s K. C. DeRhodes house (South Bend, IN, 1906), which have similar maple-seed forms.[10] She also designed windows for several of her own buildings, including the Mahony house, which features small, pointed devices made of two acute triangles that intersect at their wide ends, looking like abstracted maple seeds. The motifs in the Morton transom are formed the same way. The pendants from the paired triangles are also similar to the Mahony windows, with parallel lines intersecting another triangle.
The windows from the living room mantel of the Morton house also feature intersecting acute triangles as well as a run of leaf forms, chevron devices, triangles, and rectangles. This is a busy pattern with many of the elements that Wright would later separate and confine to individual designs: chevrons in the early Prairie years, rectangles in the later Prairie years, and triangles after 1911. Most unusual aspect is the presence of the leaves. Although Wright’s windows are often thought to be abstracted floriforms, they rarely included such complex curves, except in houses of the late 1890s. The aforementioned windows for the Winslow, McArthur, and Roberts, as well as the drawing for the waterlily window, are the exceptions. Of additional interest is the similarity of this design to the plates Wright drew for The House Beautiful, the book by William C. Gannett that he and client William Winslow produced in 1896. Almost every plate has passages of leaves like the one in the window, especially the title page, where they fill the spaces between the figures at the bottom and between the vertical motifs at the top. Significantly, portions of these borders also illustrated Spencer’s Architectural Review article.
The window from the primary bedroom closet also looks like an exploded view of part of The House Beautiful borders. Additionally, the small arrowhead shapes relate to another Wright window that could have come from the pages of The House Beautiful: the buffet doors of the Warren McArthur house, done in 1902 after the house was completed. It features the same arrowhead shape, a form not found in Wright’s later windows because it can’t be made by drafting tools alone. The center band of the Morton window with its dark triangles on the edges is also from The House Beautiful.
The largest of the Morton windows, from the stair landing, is by far the most elaborate pattern. Like the living room mantel windows, it is a amalgam of rectangles, triangles, diamonds, lozenges, and arrowheads. While more rectilinear than The House Beautiful borders, it is an evolution of them, more geometrically abstracted. Compositionally it relates to one of the windows illustrated in Spencer’s article, that for the Chauncey Williams house. The window appeared in two photographs (although in the second it is barely visible due to the flare of light), indicating that it was in fact produced.[11] It appears to have been roughly the same size as the Morton stair landing window. Like the Morton window, it is an assemblage of geometric shapes. Both windows feature two mirror-image columnar designs. Those in the Williams window are topped by circles, whereas the Morton columns are topped by rhomboids and triangles, almost thistle-like in appearance. As Wright’s window vocabulary evolved, the types of shapes used would resolve into a coherent whole, and the Morton window is a step further along that pathway than the Roberts window.
The double-column composition also appeared in the windows of the Frank Thomas house, worked on by both architects. It was initially referred to in the press and the building plans as the James Rogers house (Rogers was Thomas’ father-in-law). The use of glass in the Thomas house was extensive, and the color palette had evolved to tones of gold and amber only. At the top of the Thomas device are three long triangles pointing downward into the cluster of tiny squares that foreshadow the Darwin D. Martin house windows (Buffalo, NY, 1903-1905). Below the devices is a narrow version of the Edward Sylvester Morse beaded bamboo curtain, similar to the Morton window but simplified and clarified.
Of course, neither Wright nor Tomlinson actually fabricated their windows. The influence of the stained-glass craftspeople cannot be underestimated. They would have provided input on how glass behaves, what types of cuts can and cannot be made, available colors of glass, and sizes and types of came. However, it is difficult to know exactly what they provided in terms of design advice. It is not known who made the Morton windows, although it was probably Giannini & Hilgart in Chicago. Orlando Giannini, an artist and painter, decorated the bedrooms and playroom of Wright’s home with paintings of Native Americans and genies. They produced the windows for Davenport house and the Thomas house.
The Morton windows are made of lead came, not zinc, which is not unusual in this transitional period of Wright’s work. Although zinc came had been invented in 1893 by the Chicago Metallic Corp., Wright was just beginning to use it by 1900. Its availability and potential was probably suggested by his stained-glass makers. The Davenport windows and Bradley windows were made completely in lead came. The Thomas windows used both metals. The Henderson and Fricke houses’ windows were of zinc.
The colored glass used in Wright’s windows did not encompass a broad palette and it too evolved as his career progressed. In the 1890s, most of it was clear. As the Prairie style developed, he favored ambers and mossy greens. The ambers are there already in the Morton windows, although the pale green in the stair-landing window did not reappear until the J. Kibben Ingalls house (River Forest, IL, 1909). The small bits of bright red glass in the stair landing and living room windows appear to match that used in the B. Harley Bradley house. Different tones of white were always a favorite and comprise a broad selection, so they are difficult to trace from one Wright window to another.
The Morton windows also incorporate reflective gold, a color effect Wright came to love in his windows because it sparkled at night in the home when no daylight illuminated the colored glass. In the Morton windows, this gold is created with fired gold paint, similar to that used to decorate porcelain and mosaic tiles, like those Wright used in the fireplace mosaic of the Joseph Husser house made by Giannini & Hilgart (Chicago, 1899, demolished). Wright used gold paint extensively in the Thomas windows. In later windows, this would be replaced with gold leaf sandwiched between thin pieces of clear glass, which he had first used in the Luxfer Company display window.
[1] American Contractor (September 22, 1900), 21. The permit was also listed in “Building Permits,” Chicago Record (September 19, 1900), 10, and “Building Permits,” Inter-Ocean (September 19, 1900), 9, but no architect was listed in these notices.
[2] Vanessa Balbach Clarke, Henry Webster Tomlinson: An Investigation of the Architect and His Work (privately published, 2018), 12.
[3] Quoted in Lisa D. Schrenk, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 52.
[4] Webster Tomlinson to Grant Manson, typescript letter, January 9, 1940, Grant Carpenter Manson Research Collection, Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park, IL.
[5] Clarke, 1-19; Schrenk, 52, 266n82-84; Grant Carpenter Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1958), 216; William Allin Storrer, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54, 56, 63, 64; “Chicago,” Construction News 12 (October 5, 1890), 669. The two also created plans and designs for several unrealized houses, including the Victor Metzger house (Sault St. Marie, 1901).
[6] Clarke, 32, citing “News of the Week,” Construction News” 30 (November 5, 1910), 25.
[7] Robert Spencer, Jr., “The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Architectural Review 7 (May 1900), 64.
[8] Julie L. Sloan, Light Screens: The Complete Leaded Glass Windows of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), 140.
[9] Sloan, 251.
[10] Sloan, 295
[11] The other photo shows the window behind an easel in Wright’s studio and is reproduced in Schrenk, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright.