Late 19th-century New York produced one of history’s greatest flowerings of stained-glass art. In our churches and museums we may feast upon works by Louis Tiffany, John La Farge, Maitland Armstrong, Otto Heinigke, and Alex Locke. Today I focus on their peer, Frederick Lamb, who was not only a genius of stained-glass art but one of the great civic men of New York.

We always do better to experience works of art in situ, for example to view a stained-glass window in the context of the church for which the window was created, its size and colors determined, and so on. Excellent works by Lamb do adorn some of our churches, notably Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. There we find a series of windows illustrating the history of Puritanism.

Plymouth Church is one of the country’s treasure troves of great stainedglass art. How ironies abound in our city! When Henry Ward Beecher built the Congregationalist Plymouth Church in the 1840s, he purposely eschewed the ostentation of stained-glass art. Thus, a stained-glass window illustrating Puritan themes is very nearly an oxymoron.

Still, one must go to the Brooklyn Museum truly to get the measure of Lamb. They have a Lamb window that for me ranks among that museum’s greatest treasures.

The window is called “Religion Enthroned.” It dates from around 1899. John La Farge taught the opalescent glass method to his friend Lamb, and this impressively large window, depicting standing angels flanking an enthroned, haloed woman, is as luminous and as richly colored a window as one will ever see, an essay in blazing purples and blues.

Frederick Stymetz Lamb was born in 1863. His father, Joseph, and uncle, Richard, had in 1853 co-founded the J & R Lamb stained-glass studio in New York City. (Lamb Studios still operates, in Ridgewood, N.J., and still produces highquality ecclesiastical glass.) Frederick, a muralist as well as glass artist, founded the National Society of Mural Painters.

With his brother, Charles Rollinson Lamb,he was an early leader of the Municipal Art Society. Today, the venerable society is known as an advocate for planning and preservation. But when the society was founded in 1893,its mission was to promote the embellishment of the city with works of public art, in line with the ideals of the “City Beautiful” movement.

Gregory Gilmartin, in “Shaping the City,” a history of the Municipal Art Society, said that the Lamb brothers grew up in an atmosphere suffused with the values of the Arts and Crafts movement. “They saw their studio as a kind of modern-day medieval guild, a place where artists joined craftsmen at the worktable, wives worked with their husbands, and children became their fathers’ apprentices.”

Given his belief that the artist’s role was to create environments for living, Frederick Lamb, who died in 1928, might have bridled at the irony that his greatest window should be stuck in a museum.