© 2013 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Tree of Life window,
1904
More Context
Handbook Entry
The "Tree of Life" windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the reception room and second-floor bedrooms of the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York, are perhaps the best-known motifs in all his work. Although there is no evidence that Wright, or the Martin family, used the popular term to describe the design, it aptly describes the geometric pattern of diagonal "branches" terminating in colored "leaves," radiating out from a central trunk-like form that is grounded in a square base, or "pot," at the bottom. Over seven hundred pieces of mostly clear glass were used in the production of each of the Martin House’s more than sixty "Tree of Life" windows, which formed a key part of the complex’s sixteen distinct patterns of art glass and collectively helped to comprise one of Wright’s most sophisticated and elaborate architectural ensembles.
Information
1904
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1981", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 41, no. 1 (1982): p. 16-31., p. 31 (illus.)
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 74
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 411
