Tiffany heralded landscape as an appropriate alternative to figural subjects for memorial windows, thereby conferring upon the natural world religious significance. This window, originally installed in a mausoleum in a Brooklyn cemetery, presents a familiar motif, the River of Life, with the slender stream zig-zagging through mountains and spilling into a placid pool in the middle ground of the composition. Masses of iris and two magnolia trees dominate the foreground and aptly illustrate the coloristic properties of Tiffany's famed opalescent glass. The folds and manipulation of the glass while it was in its semimolten state realistically simulates the texture of the magnolia blossoms.