The Metropolitan Museum of Art is turning its attention this autumn to the paper stage of Louis Comfort Tiffany's glittering career. Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from 22 October 2026 to 7 February 2027, gathers nearly 120 works, mostly from the museum's own collection with selected loans, and claims to be the first major exhibition devoted specifically to the design drawings behind Tiffany's celebrated creations.

The headline reunion concerns a monumental stained-glass window, Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria from 1911, lent by the Chrysler Museum of Art. Its original wisteria transoms were recently discovered in a private home in Arizona, and the Met show presents window and transoms together for the first time in at least half a century. The pairing lets visitors see a finished work of American decorative art beside the working drawings that planned it, closing a gap of decades in the object's history.

The exhibition's wider argument recasts Tiffany himself. Instead of a lone celebrated name attached to luminous windows, lamps, mosaics and interiors, the show presents the leader of a large collaborative enterprise, populated by designers, artisans and émigrés whose contributions often went uncredited, including women. Drawings are treated not as secondary material but as the centre of the story, the fragile first step between an idea and a glowing object.

The Met's director, Max Hollein, has described the museum's Tiffany design drawings as an unmatched resource for understanding how iconic works of American decorative art came to life. Supported by Tiffany and Co., the exhibition uses those sheets to open up the cultural ambitions of the Gilded Age itself: an era when newly wealthy patrons wanted interiors that announced taste, craft and modernity, and when a studio system turned that appetite into glass, metal and light.