70 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • JULY 2020
REAR VIEW
CLARA DRISCOLL
ILLUMINATING THE GLASS CEILING
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
Today, exquisite, instantly recognizable
Tiffany lamps and other stained-glass
art nouveau masterpieces fetch hundreds
of thousands at auction. Louis
Comfort Tiffany originally claimed
credit, but many works were actually
created by female artists led by head
designer Clara Driscoll.
She was one of the few employees
invited to Tiffany’s sumptuous Laurel
Hollow estate on Long Island, Laurelton
Hall. He was particular about the pieces
produced for Tiffany Studios, hiring
only the most talented artisans. Why
did Clara Driscoll become his foremost
artist?
A 2,000-PIECE LAMP
Born in Tallmadge, Ohio in 1861, Driscoll
was raised by her widowed single mother
who defied popular thinking and
encouraged her daughter to move to
New York to enroll at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art School, at a time when
women working outside the home was
frowned on. Her artistry became evident
by 1888, when she was hired by the
Tiffany factory in Corona, Queens.
Tiffany, the son of famed jeweler
Charles Lewis Tiffany, was a nomadic
painter who devised glass formulas.
From his renderings of outdoor scenery,
he designed bronzes, enamels,
ceramics, and jewelry — but it was
through stained-glass pieces for his
decorating business that his true vision
shone.
In 1892, Driscoll was named supervisor
of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department,
known as the “Tiffany Girls.” For
the first time, women were allowed to
cut out patterns and select glass for
windows and mosaics; by 1897, about
40 of the most skilled female artisans
were creating meticulous preparatory
drawings known as cartoons. There
was constant turnover, because the
department would not employ married
women.
Proud of her work, Driscoll wrote in
an 1899 letter to her family, “There are
three hundred square feet of small pieces
of glass to be accomplished. There is
Clara Driscoll at her Tiffany Studios workroom with chief assistant Joseph Briggs, 1901. (The NewYork Historical
Society)
nothing like having enough work to do
and feeling able to do so.” That year, Tiffany
sold the first electric lamp with a
stained-glass base and shade. The lamps
became coveted collectors’ items.
It was the women artists’ idea to make
lamp shades from pieces of glass left
over from window manufacturing.
In 1900, Tiffany Studios’ Dragonfly
lampshade, Driscoll’s design, earned
a bronze medal at the Paris world’s
fair. But in company literature, Tiffany
credited only himself.
We know this because surviving along
with painterly glass artifacts are thousands
of Driscoll’s letters detailing her
creations and those of her staff. The
letters discovered in the early 2000s at
the Queens Historical Society described
Driscoll’s Gilded Age life: She lived in a
Manhattan boarding house, rode her
bicycle, and shopped at Lord & Taylor
and Wanamaker’s, as electricity lit the
city and the new subway rumbled underground.
Her letters also contained
sketches, designs for which she would
not get credit, including the magnificent
2,000-piece Wisteria Lamp inspired by
the lush lavender-hued plants cascading
atop the pergola at Tiffany’s Long
Island estate.
LONG ISLAND SHANGRI-LA
Echoing the pervasive belief of the
art nouveau period, Tiffany said that
women possessed a “natural decorative
taste” and “keen perception of color.” He
encouraged Driscoll’s creativity and
sought her collaboration. During her
20 years in Tiffany’s employ, she was
given more responsibility, an increased
budget, considerable artistic freedom —
and invitations to his palatial estate on
the site of the once-popular Laurelton
Hotel resort. On one visit, she was
summoned to Tiffany’s bedside while
he was ill to discuss the house’s Four
Seasons window. She wrote in March
1906 of wearing her “fine new dress” to
Sunday dinner at Laurelton.
And what an estate Laurelton was. Tiffany’s
vision of Xanadu incorporated
Turkish, Moorish, and Persian design
throughout the eight-level, 84-room
house on 580 acres overlooking Cold
Spring Harbor. Stately peacocks
roamed the terraced gardens near a
chapel, stables, art gallery, studio, conservatories,
greenhouses, museum, and
railway station. Inspiration abounded
for Driscoll amid woodlands, apple orchards,
and wildflowers. Inside, calla
lilies and floating lotuses (a co-worker
called them “part of the exotic, garish
decor”) graced an octagonal stone pool;
rotating watercolor-hued lights illuminated
tall iridescent Favrile glass vase
fountains; a leaded-glass dome cast an
amethyst hue upon the court; and so on.
GLASS OUTLIVES SILK
Driscoll made Tiffany famous by designing
inkwells, tea screens, mosaic
desk sets, and at least 30 lamps, and
most likely originated the concept of
kerosene- and electric-powered lamps
of leaded glass.
After marrying and leaving Tiffany
Studios in 1909, she turned to designing
hand-painted gossamer silk
scarves; none survived. Many Tiffany
windows are still intact, illuminating
several Long Island churches. He died
in 1933 and she in 1944, before Laurelton
Hall was largely destroyed by
fire in 1957, when firefighters battling
the blaze had to smash its stained-glass
windows.
There is nothing like having enough work to
do and feeling able to do so,” said Tiffany’s chief
designer Clara Driscoll.
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