A spectacular three-part window created by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s renowned glass studio and designed by Agnes Northrop has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The monumental windows adorned the Great Hall of Linden Hall, the stately home of in Dawson, Pennsylvania, before they were sold and disappeared into a private collection in 2005. Now they will return to public view.

As part of the Museum’s American Wing 100th anniversary, the window will be installed in the Charles Engelhard Court beginning November 2024. The window will be dramatically framed by the columns from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island country estate.

The window was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a former housemaid who married Philip Cochran, the son and sole heir to a coal fortune, and thus became lady of the estate she had once cleaned. She was widowed young and their son died while still in college, so she took on management of the family’s complex business interests, earning her the sobriquet “Coal Queen.” At the same time, she traveled around Europe seeking inspiration, furnishings and antiques for the new home she was having built back in Pennsylvania.

Construction of Linden Hall began in 1911. Sarah commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to create the stained glass windows for the great hall in 1912. Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s most prominent female designers who started in the 1880s as one the “Tiffany Girls,” the group of women who created some of the glassworks’ most iconic designs for windows, lamps and other decorative pieces that have gone down in history as the signature Tiffany style.

Northrop was the head of the design crew for a short time, before graduating to working on solo projects in her own office. She pioneered the stained-glass landscape windows of iridescent glass, designed them first in gouache watercolor and pencil, before the glass was created from her designs at the Louis Comfort Tiffany studio in New York. Northrop’s gouache of the central window for the Linden Hall commission is already in the collection of the Met and has been since 1967.

The finished window was so spectacular that Louis Comfort Tiffany briefly put it on display in his Manhattan showroom at 37th Street and Fifth Avenue before it was installed at Linden Hall. The lush flowers, tree-lined arbor, formal garden with central fountain and mountain pine forests on the horizon were designed to mimic Linden’s actual gardens. Light and colored flooded into the Great Hall through the northern exposure windows.

Sarah Cochran died in 1936, bequeathing Linden to her brother. It passed through several hands over the next few decades, include an order of monks, before the current owners, the United Steelworkers Union, bought the estate in 1976. In 2005, the USU sold the windows to a private buyer for $6.8 million, replacing them with simple clear panes decorated with a heraldry crest in the middle of each panel. The union explained this seemingly inexplicable decision as unfortunate but necessary as the astronomical costs of insuring the Tiffany windows became increasingly unaffordable.

For nearly two decades the Linden Hall Garden Landscape was out of view. Earlier this year, funds from a variety of donors made it possible for the Garden Landscape to be brought back into the light for all to see two miles south of where it had once graced the Tiffany Studios showroom.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said: “This stunning work of art is an extraordinary example of the transformational creativity of Agnes Northrop and Tiffany Studios. Magnificent in concept and execution and more than grand in size, it deepens the American Wing’s Tiffany holdings and will enhance the already stunning Engelhard Court with a powerful, immersive viewing experience.”

A pair of portraits that are the smallest Rembrandt ever painted have come back to light after falling into obscurity in a private collection for 200 years. Before they were sold at auction this summer, Rijksmuseum experts were engaged to research the works and the subjects. Their exhaustive investigation confirmed the attribution to Rembrandt and the identities of the sitters. The portraits went on display at the Rijksmuseum on Wednesday.

The subjects are Jan Willemsz van der Pluym, a wealthy slater and plumber in Leiden, and his wife Jaapgen Caerlsdr. They were 69 and 70 years old respectively in 1635 when the 29-year-old Rembrandt painted them. He was the top portraitist in Amsterdam at that time. Wealthy burghers paid huge sums to be immortalized by the most sought-after artist in the city. The wedding portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, now co-owned by France and the Netherlands, were the only life-sized, full-length portraits Rembrandt ever painted. The 19.9cm-by-16.5cm oval portraits of Jan and Jaapgen are the smallest portraits he ever painted.

Experts believe he may have painted them as a favor because Jan and Jaapgen were family friends and relatives by marriage. They were visiting Amsterdam for a baptism at that time and Jonathan Bikker, the Rijksmuseum’s curator of 17th-century Dutch painting, believes he may have asked Rembrandt to scare up a couple of portraits right quick which he would then make large copies of later.

The van der Pluyms had a close bond with Rembrandt’s family, which began in 1624 when Jan and Jaapgen’s son Dominicus wed Rembrandt’s cousin Cornelia Cornelisdr van Suytbroek. Suspicions that the portraits were by Rembrandt’s hand were confirmed after extensive technical research conducted by the Rijksmuseum using X-radiography, infrared photography, infrared reflectography, macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), stereomicroscopy and paint sample analysis. When taken together the various research results amount to compelling evidence. First of all, the bold and vigorous style used to render these portraits corresponds with Rembrandt’s rapid execution of other portraits and tronies from 1634 onwards. Similarly, the manner in which changes were made during the painting process is also consistent with other paintings by the artist. These alterations are visible in both collars and Jaapgen’s cap. Examination with a stereomicroscope revealed that the portraits were built up in a similar manner to other portraits painted by Rembrandt in this period. Moreover, the pigments match those frequently used by Rembrandt, including lead white, lead-tin yellow, bone- or ivory black, various earth pigments, vermilion and red lake. The same brown, iron-containing paint was used for both inscriptions, along with the signature and date on the portrait of Jan. The portraits also bear striking similarities regarding the buildup and composition of the paint compared to other portraits painted by Rembrandt in 1634 and 1635 – especially in the construction of the facial features and the loose brushwork.

The portraits remained in Jan and Jaapgen’s family until they were sold after the death of their great-great grandson Martenten Hove in 1760. They passed through a few titled hands after that, eventually being sold by James Murray, 1st Baron Glenlyon, at a Christie’s auction in 1824. The portraits entered a private UK collection after that sale and were unknown to scholars until a descendant decided to sell them.

They were sold in July in an auction at Christie’s in London for £11.2 million. The buyer was Henry Holterman, who then turned around and gave them to the Rijksmuseum on long-term loan. Holterman said:

The Rijksmuseum has the largest and most representative collection of Rembrandt paintings in the world. Given my close relationship with the museum and the fact that the team of experts has been conducting research into these portraits over a period of years, I feel that these works belong in the museum.

Restoration of a 17th century portrait of Diana Cecil, great-granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I’s chief advisor William Cecil, has revealed her original thin upper lip and high forehead, removing the overpaint that had artificially plumped her pucker and lowered her hairline. The conservation also revealed the signature of the artist and the date hidden in the folds of the curtain: Cornelius Johnson, 1634.

The portrait is one of two of Diana Cecil in The Suffolk Collection, a group of 400 works, many portraits of aristocrats and royals but also other masterpieces by the likes of Vermeer, Turner and Rembrandt, amassed by the Howard family from the 17th to the 20th century. Diana’s sister Elizabeth was married to a Howard, which is how the portraits came to be in the collection. The greatest portraits of The Suffolk Collection are nine full-length pieces by the premiere Jacobean portraitist William Larkin, one of which is a 1614 portrait of Diana Cecil painted when she was about 15 years old. Her high forehead and fine upper lip are in evidence even at that young age.

Diana Cecil was considered one of the great beauties of the Jacobean nobility. She married twice, first to Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford, in 1624, barely a year before his death, and again in 1629 to Thomas Bruce, who would be created 1st Earl of Elgin by King Charles I in 1633. The newly-restored portrait of Diana was made the year after her husband received that rich favor.

In the later portrait, Cecil wears a fashionable blue satin bodice and full, trailing skirt. In contrast to the earlier portrait, elite fashion is characterised by understated elegance, rather than opulently patterned fabric or complicated layering, English heritage said.

Plain silk, satin or taffeta were the height of fashion, with one or two focal points, such as the red ribbons laced across the front of Cecil’s bodice, holding the stomacher in place, and a matching red rose at her breast and a patterned fan, which she holds half-open in front of her.

The Suffolk Collection is displayed at Kenwood House, a stately neoclassical villa in Hampstead administered by English Heritage. The later portrait of Diana Cecil recently underwent conservation so that it could be put on display. It had suffered significantly from having been rolled up widthways, damaging the paint surface, and old varnish had yellowed, dimming the once-brilliant colors. The removal of the old varnish uncovered the touch-ups to her lips and hair, likely made in the late 19th or early 20th century in a failed attempt to repair some of the damage from the rolling and update her looks in keeping with beauty standards of the time while they were at it.

Alice Tate-Harte, collections conservator (fine art) at English Heritage, said in a press release: “As a paintings conservator I am often amazed by the vivid and rich colours that reveal themselves as I remove old, yellowing varnish from portraits, but finding out Diana’s features had been changed so much was certainly a surprise!

“While the original reason for overpainting could have been to cover damage from the portrait being rolled, the restorer certainly added their own preferences to ‘sweeten’ her face. I hope I’ve done Diana justice by removing those additions and presenting her natural face to the world.”

The restored portrait of Diana Cecil will go on display next to the portrait of her second husband Thomas Bruce at Kenwood House on November 30th.