For Sunset Ridge Church in San Antonio, Texas, its century-old Tiffany Studios altar window was a mixed blessed. The dappled forest scene of far-off mountains, lush foliage, and flowing waters was a source of pride that illuminated the chapel with iridescent light. But it was also an insurance liability—so much so that for the past decade, Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) (1917) was roped off from visitors.

The church was keen for the Tiffany to find a new home and though private collectors and dealers were circling, it wanted a large public audience for the more than nine-foot-tall window. In May last year, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, announced it had acquired the window for an undisclosed price (a slightly larger 1913 window sold at Sotheby’s in 2025 for a record $12.4 million).

Detail of Mountain Landscape. Photo: courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Now, the museum founded by Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and philanthropist, has installed the window in its Visions of America Galleries, which traces 500 years of American art. Mountain Landscape, which was designed by Agnes Northrup, sits in a turquoise-colored alcove whose customizable lighting system will allow curators to play with brightness and tone. The unveiling follows a months-long conservation and the window is being presented alongside artworks featuring nature and landscape.

“The Tiffany Studios window is remarkable for incorporating light itself as a material, using the luminosity of glass,” Jen Padgett, the museum’s curator of craft, said over email. “When approaching the window, visitors walk through a passageway with views of the wooded landscape surrounding the museum, further emphasizing the connection to nature.”

Northrup was a pioneering artist whose bucolic designs are tied to Tiffany’s aesthetics. Starting out as a so-called “Tiffany Girl” in the company’s Queens, New York, studios, she chose not to marry (Louis Comfort Tiffany didn’t retain married women) and rose steadily in a male-dominated field. By the 1890s, Northrup was running her own studio at Tiffany and would file patents for her designs. At the time of the Mountain Landscape’s commission she had decades of experience and readily evokes the sweep of a vast landscape and its ever-changing light.

Installation view of Arkansas State Window. Photo: courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Mountain Landscape was originally commissioned by the Woodmen of the World, a fraternal life insurance society, and installed in the company’s Nebraska headquarters. In 1931, the organization built the San Antonio chapel as part of a tuberculosis hospital and for decoration it turned again to Tiffany, commissioning the studio to represent all the states in which Woodmen operated. Sunset Ridge, which bought the property in the late 1950s, has donated Arkansas State Window, a pale-colored lancet window featuring the state’s seal.

The windows join a wisteria lamp designed by Clara Driscoll, manager of the “Tiffany Girls,” which was donated to Crystal Bridges in 2022 by the Benedict Silverman Collection.

Crystal Bridges turned 15 this year and the unveiling of the windows arrives ahead of the completion of a landmark expansion in June, a project designed by Safdie Architects that will add 114,000 square feet to facilities.