The Stained-Glass Windows of St. Andrew’s Dune Church is a visual exploration of a treasure in the Hamptons: the extraordinary windows of a summer resort church span nearly 150 years of stained glass in America.
Stained-glass windows are superb works of art, and the 45 stunning windows in St. Andrew’s Dune Church, a red-shingled 1879 structure nestled among the dunes in Southampton, New York, make this intimately scaled house of worship one of the most picturesque summer resort churches on the eastern seaboard.
The diverse assemblage ranges from breathtaking opalescent-glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge to Pre-Raphaelite-inspired panes by the British firm Heaton; Butler & Bayne to lushly floral windows by Bostonian Wilbur Herbert Burnham; and, coming full circle, to Stephen Hannock’s opalescent-glass landscape window, installed in 2020. All contributed by congregants to memorialize loved ones, the windows offer a stunning overview of the history of stained glass from the 19th century to today.
In her authoritative text, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen recounts the storied history of the church, including the devastation to the building and many of its windows caused by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, and describes each window in vivid detail: its subject, artistic style, and the person it memorializes. Illustrated with beautiful photographs of the church by Tria Giovan and specially commissioned images of every window by Joseph Coscia Jr., The Stained-Glass Windows of St. Andrew’s Dune Church brings a little-known treasure of American decorative arts history to a wider audience.
