By Linda Arntzenius

Louis Comfort Tiffany. His name evokes one-of-a-kind Art Nouveau windows and lamps with jewel-like, leaded glass shades. Clara Wolcott Driscoll? Not so much. And yet, Driscoll’s was the creative hand behind many of Tiffany’s most iconic designs. How do we know? Because like many Victorians, Clara was an avid letter writer who kept her family back home in Ohio up-to-date on New York City life at the turn of the 20th Century. Her letters reveal a lively young woman with a wry sense of humor, making her way in a man’s world, bicycling around Manhattan in a riding skirt just a tad shorter than the accepted length, going to the opera, and, even though women weren’t allowed to vote, fully informed on the politics of her day with a perspective that took in the Lower East Side as well as Gilded Age Manhattan.

From time to time some new archival discovery changes what we thought we knew. In 2005, a cache of Clara’s letters set art historians buzzing over the creative origins of those famous Tiffany lamps oft-seen appraised for enormous sums on Antiques Roadshow. When Dragonfly or Wisteria lamps from Tiffany Studios go on the block, bids range from $450,000 to $600,000. The correspondence shows that Clara Wolcott Driscoll, not Louis Comfort Tiffany, was responsible for these iconic designs. Clara’s letters transformed public perception of Tiffany Studios and the role of the women who worked there and led to an exhibition at the New York Historical Society and to several books, including lively novels by Susan Vreeland and Echo Heron.

CLARA AND MR. TIFFANY

Susan Vreeland’s novel, Clara and Mr. Tiffany, blends historical fact with imagined fiction. Clara and Louis C. bond over their shared appreciation for glass. Vreeland, who buried herself in Clara’s correspondence, found her to be “. . . independent and self-sufficient, talented and ambitious, educated and self-educated, emancipated to a degree, opinionated, wry, vibrant, and hungry to grasp all that life in the nation’s cultural capital had to offer‑‑ an embodiment of the New Woman.”

Vreeland describes the discovery of the letters as “a historical fiction writer’s gold,” revealing Clara’s close relationships with five men and a colorful cast of characters at the studios and in the boardinghouse she shared with other artists and quirky individuals on the edge of bohemian life, against the backdrop of a fast moving city being transformed by modern industrial technology. Subways, skyscrapers, electric street lights, the new Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were transforming the city formed by the consolidation of the five boroughs into the second largest in the world.

Vreeland’s Clara is torn between love and art at a time of growing feminist consciousness when young women were joining the workforce. The author makes much of the fact that Tiffany Studios would not hire married women. She pits Clara and The Tiffany Girls against the male workers who would be rid of them. In the novel, Clara is faced with a professional/personal dichotomy; the world of her work and creative artistry or the world of her heart. Told in Clara’s voice, the book introduces readers to Clara’s complex relationship with Tiffany through her descriptions of her employer’s affectations such as the cane he doesn’t really need. Inwardly, she calls him Napoleonic and describes him as a peacock. Outwardly, she plays on her youth and her position of trust to tease him from time to time.

TIFFANY STUDIOS

There is no disputing that Louis Comfort Tiffany was a highly skilled and innovative designer of jewelry, ceramics, enamels, metalwork, and glass. His father Charles Tiffany, a master of silver and jewelry, founded the famed Tiffany & Co., which continues to thrive today. Louis C. is best known today for richly-colored opalescent stained-glass. Innovative in style and execution, he created new kinds of glass as well as an expressive organic style that took leaded glass beyond the confines of churches and into homes, albeit rather grand homes. Above all other qualities, objects produced by Tiffany Studios were intended to be beautiful. In his essay, “The Quest of Beauty,” Louis C. describes beauty as “a mental attitude.” Be that as it may, the business ultimately succumbed to changing aesthetics and values. Unlike Tiffany & Co., Tiffany Studios didn’t survive beyond the early 1930s.

But when Clara Wolcott went to work for Tiffany Studios around 1888, business was booming. Louis C. hired her straight from the new Metropolitan Museum of Art School. Within four years, she was such an experienced designer that Tiffany appointed her to lead the newly-formed Women’s Glass Cutting Department, which executed his design of the Story of the Cross window for the chapel at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By 1894, the department employed 35 women graduates from Cooper Union and the School of Applied Design; by 1897, some 50 young women worked there, according to an article by Cecilia Waern in the September 1897 issue of The International Studio.

All of them, incidentally, were unmarried; a company policy that was not unusual at the time. Indeed, in hiring women, Tiffany Studios might be said to be ahead of its time, if it were not for the fact that the women’s department was formed after a strike by the male-only Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters Union. That he had women on his staff was so unusual at the time that it was written up in several contemporary publications, including an 1894 article in The Art Interchange, “Women Workers in Glass at the Tiffany Studios,” in which the company was described as “progressive” in its “experiment of employing women.”

But no true story is ever simple. The relationship between the two gender-specific departments was not always smooth and Clara’s time there was interrupted by her first marriage to Francis Driscoll. When her husband died, Clara returned to Tiffany Studios around 1898, until a second marriage in 1909 forced her to leave once again.

FROM OHIO STUDENT TO TIFFANY GIRL

Since Clara’s 1898 return to Tiffany Studios coincides with the production of its first leaded glass lamp shades with nature-based themes, it is thought likely that the idea for this new product line was hers. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s style of leadership was patriarchal. Although a team of skilled designers and craftspeople transformed his vision, other than a few individuals, it was not his company policy to credit designers, male or female. Still, Clara’s contributions were recognized when she won a medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. It is now widely accepted that Mrs. Driscoll was the creative force behind more than 30 lamps bases and shades, including the famous Wisteria, Dragonfly, Peony, and Daffodil, as well as a wide range of other objects.

Born in Tallmadge, Ohio, Clara Pierce Wolcott (1861– 1944) was the oldest of four sisters. After graduating from Cleveland’s Western Reserve School of Design for Women, she worked briefly for a local furniture maker before joining the tide of young women flowing into New York City for respectable careers in the burgeoning field of industrial arts. She shared Louis C. Tiffany’s love of nature and appreciation of beautiful materials, especially the iridescent glass pioneered by his glassmakers. Clara flourished under his direction and advanced to a position of trust, and earned one of the highest salaries paid to a women of her time, $10,000 per year. She met regularly with her employer to discuss her department, and, one imagines, to brainstorm designs and push for their execution. Clara’s letters reveal her desire for a more artistic environment and her annoyance that her department was assessed according to commercial terms when others were not.

Her Dragonfly lamp was so expensive to produce that some company managers doubted it would prove profitable. But Tiffany described it as “the most interesting lamp in the place” and ordered examples to be displayed in London and Paris. The prize awarded to Clara’s design in Paris, was later mentioned in the New York Daily News, bringing her a rare moment of public recognition.

Her letters show that Clara was extremely proud of her work and the steady stream of orders that flowed into the women’s department. In February 1902, she wrote that a total of 15 Wisteria shades had been ordered at $350 each, noting “all of which goes down to my credit, it being my design.” In March 16, 1905, she reported that a total of 123 had been made. In the following year, there were so many orders for the Wisteria and other shades that the men’s department joined the women’s department working at capacity to fulfill them.

All records for Tiffany Studios were lost in the early 1930s, so the discovery of Clara’s correspondence at the Queens Historical Society in New York and the Kelso House Museum Collection at Kent State University Library Special Collections in Ohio is regarded as a significant find.

The efforts of Martin Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Margaret K. Hofer of New York Historical Society (NYHS), and independent curator and scholar Nina Gray, led to Driscoll’s contributions being publicized in 2006. It was a revelation to the general public that Louis Comfort Tiffany was not personally responsible for each and every design produced under his name. Clara was one of a number of men and women designers employed by Tiffany Studios. Others include Agnes Northrop, Alice Gouvy, and Julia Munson. Clara Driscoll and the “Tiffany Girls” had created many of the lamps originally attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany and his staff of male designers. NYHS mounted an exhibition, accompanied by 200-page catalog, A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, written by Eidelberg, Gray and Hofer.

After Clara left Tiffany Studios for good, in 1909, she developed her own business designing hand-painted silk scarves. Sadly, none are known to have survived, but any visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museum art stores will have seen silk scarves with Tiffany Studios designs. As a married woman, Clara never achieved outshone the creative accomplishments of her years with Tiffany. When she died in 944, her remarkable achievements there were forgotten until the discovery of her letters in 2005.

Another novel inspired by Clara’s writings, is Noon at Tiffany’s: A Historical, Biographical Novel by Echo Heron. Written in 2007 after its author heard about Clara’s 1,330 weekly letters to two of her sisters and her mother between 1853 and the 1930s, the book takes its title from Clara’s description of designing a daffodil lamp at “Noon at Tiffany’s.” Echo uses sections from the letters together with entries from Clara’s diary. The pensive looking woman on the cover is Clara.

In addition to the NYHS catalog mentioned above, Tiffany Desk Treasures by George A. Kemeny and Donald Miller, published in 2002, acknowledges Clara Driscoll’s significant contribution to Tiffany glass.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND TIFFANY LAMPS TODAY?

Numerous Tiffany-inspired lamps can be bought from lighting stores and big box outlets but the real thing is like nothing made this side of 1928 when the Tiffany Studios New York ceased production. Apart from an unlikely discovery in Great Aunt Augusta’s attic or a visit to a museum such at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for most of us the best bet of seeing one of these gorgeous lamps is at the Macklowe Gallery, 667 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065, which has an extensive collection of original signed lamps as well as other exquisite Tiffany Studios items for sale. 212.644.6400; www.macklowegallery.com.

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Florida boasts the world most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany works. www.morsemuseum.org.

The New York Historical Society’s permanent collection has 132 Tiffany lamps and three windows, a gift from Dr. Egon Neustadt in 1984. An Austrian immigrant, New York City orthodontist, and successful real estate developer, Neustadt began collecting Tiffany lamps in 1935 when he and his wife Hildegard purchased their first lamp in a Greenwich Village antique shop. Over five decades, Neustadt amassed one of the most important and most comprehensive Tiffany collections in the world. A selection, including Clara Driscoll’s Peacock Table Lamp, is on view in the Luce Center of the New York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at 77th Street, New York, NY 10024; 212.873.3400; www.nyhistory.org.