Edward Colonna

E. Colonna, Dayton, OH, 1983, pp. 24-27 (for a discussion of the Van Horne commission) and p. 25, fig. 44 (for an identical window in the collection of Lillian Nassau, Ltd., New York)

Edward Colonna was born in Cologne, Germany and immigrated in 1882 to New York, where he worked briefly with Louis Comfort Tiffany and prominent New York architect Bruce Price.  In 1885 he was hired as a designer by the Barney and Smith Manufacturing Company of Dayton, Ohio, a supplier of cars to the Canadian Pacific Railway.  In 1890 Colonna opened an architectural office in Montreal, where for the next three years he designed railroad stations for Canadian Pacific.  Around 1890, William Van Horne, president of Canadian Pacific and an avid art collector, commissioned Colonna to expand and redecorate his Montreal mansion on Sherbrooke Street.  The window presently offered represents an upper pane in one of the large vertical windows in the redecorated salon.  It is likely that Colonna designed the window's lead pattern to relate to architectural elements in the salon's woodwork and plaster ceiling design.