The Museum's webpage (
visit link) informs us:
"Tiffany Stained Glass Windows
First and Second Floors
George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum
Among the most celebrated features of the Smith Art Museum are its original Tiffany stained glass windows. Manufactured by the Tiffany Glass Company of New York City, the windows were installed in 1895 as the museum was being completed. The windows are rare examples of Tiffany work commissioned for a museum building; the only other known windows made especially for a museum were at the Henry Field Memorial Art Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago and have not survived.
The windows in the Smith Art Museum mark a turning point in the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Prior to the mid-1890s, his stained glass windows were mostly for churches. However, by 1894, the year the museum windows were shipped from the studio, he had begun designing windows with secular themes. Those in the Japanese Arms and Armor Gallery commemorate famous authors such as Goethe and Moliere, bearing their crests and dates of birth and death. In the front lobby, windows celebrate the disciplines originally housed in the museum: art, science and literature. In what is now the Hasbro Games Art Discovery Center, the distinguished marks of book printers are incorporated in the window design.
And Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"The most important of Goethe's works produced before he went to Weimar were Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a tragedy that was the first work to bring him recognition, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (called Die Leiden des jungen Werthers in German) (1774), which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism – indeed the book is often considered to be the "spark" which ignited the movement, and can arguably be called the world's first "best-seller". (For the entirety of his life this was the work with which the vast majority of Goethe's contemporaries associated him). During the years at Weimar before he met Schiller he began Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, wrote the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), Egmont, Torquato Tasso, and the fable Reineke Fuchs.
To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (the continuation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), the idyll of Hermann and Dorothea, the Roman Elegies and the verse drama The Natural Daughter. In the last period, between Schiller's death, in 1805, and his own, appeared Faust Part One, Elective Affinities, the West-Eastern Divan (a collection of poems in the Persian style, influenced by the work of Hafez), his autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth) which covers his early life and ends with his departure for Weimar, his Italian Journey, and a series of treatises on art. His writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles.
Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijñanasakuntalam, which was one of the first works of Sanskrit literature that became known in Europe, after being translated from English to German.
Faust Part Two was only finished in the year of his death, and was published posthumously. Also published after his death was the so-called Urfaust, the first sketches, made probably in 1773–74.
Goethe-Schiller Monument (1857), Weimar.The short epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide. Goethe admitted that he "shot his hero to save himself": a reference to Goethe's own near-suicidal obsession with a young woman during this period, an obsession he quelled through the writing process. The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable; its central hero, an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte, has become a pervasive literary archetype. The fact that Werther ends with the protagonist's suicide and funeral—a funeral which "no clergyman attended"—made the book deeply controversial upon its (anonymous) publication, for on the face of it, it appeared to condone and glorify suicide. Suicide was considered sinful by Christian doctrine: suicides were denied Christian burial with the bodies often mistreated and dishonoured in various ways; in corollary, the deceased's property and possessions were often confiscated by the Church. Epistolary novels were common during this time, letter-writing being a primary mode of communication. What set Goethe's book apart from other such novels was its expression of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility, its sense of defiant rebellion against authority, and of principal importance, its total subjectivity: qualities that trailblazed the Romantic movement."