The Laser Eye Clinic Where Women Made Tiffany Lamps
On the Work We Know and the Names We Don't
It is a famous assertion of Shakespeare’s that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.1 It’s a good position to take because names are never quite as certain as they seem. Head downtown and you can walk south from Liberty Street to Cedar to Pine, a stroll that used to take you from Crown Street to Queen Street to King Street.2 Even the idea of authorship is written more in sand than stone: Louisa May Alcott wrote under so many different pseudonyms for so many reasons that a scholar of nineteenth century literature at Northeastern is pretty sure he recovered new stories of Alcott’s in 2023.3 Whether names are hidden or papered over, any label under a magnifying glass will reveal more than what’s apparent to the naked eye. Speaking of glass!4 When one thinks of the ornamental leaded glass lamps popular around the turn of the last century, the name that comes to mind is Tiffany.5 But if that were the full story this would be an Instagram post rather than a newsletter.
The Tiffany in question is Louis Comfort Tiffany, the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany of “& Co” fame and no relation to the Tiffany who topped charts with “I Think We’re Alone Now.” Charles Tiffany had been born in Connecticut in 1812. He worked in his father’s cotton mill for a bit but when he was 25, he borrowed a thousand dollars and headed to New York with a friend from school named John Young to strike out on their own.6 They started a stationary store on Broadway and Warren across from City Hall Park and the Tweed Courthouse, two blocks north of where the Woolworth Building would eventually stand and one block south of the New York Sun Building.7
They expanded in the 1840s, selling finer goods like glassware, clocks and porcelain and designing their own jewelry which they listed in catalogs in a very identifiable shade of blue. In 1841, Tiffany married Young’s sister, Harriet, which one hopes cushioned the blow when his name eventually got bumped out of the store title. When the political temperature in Europe got a bit hot under the very high collar, Tiffany saw opportunity. As 1848 became known as The Year of Revolutions,8 he bought diamonds from aristocratic families when the gemstone market took a hit since revolutions don’t usually mean high demand for expensive luxury goods.9 In 1851, the store instituted a silver standard and in 1853, it was officially reorganized as Tiffany & Co, laying a pretty solid foundation for the retailer we think of today and the goods it's most tied to. Let’s jump back to 1848 for a moment, when unrest was rising and gem prices were falling. That is also the year Charles and Harriet Tiffany had their third child and second son, Louis Comfort Tiffany.10 He was sent to military academies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which sounded much less Ted Being Punished By His Dad For Failing History in the nineteenth century, and then trained as a painter. On a trip to Europe in 1865, however, he became extremely taken with the ancient glass and the techniques to create it he saw in the South Kensington Museum in London11 and found a new medium.
On his return to New York, he experimented with new techniques to help him recapture the depth of color and vibrancy that had so entranced him with the glass he had seen abroad. By mixing in different materials like metal oxides before the glass was shaped, Tiffany created an iridescent “favrile” glass12 that had color throughout the glass rather than a surface treatment. It gave his designs, to use a technical term, a little something-something.13 He teamed up with fellow painters/interior designers Samuel Colman and Lockwood de Forest as well as Candace Wheeler, an extremely influential interior and textile designer, feminist, and a co-founder of the New York Exchange for Women’s Work.14 They worked together under different names: Tiffany & Wheeler, Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists then Louis C. Tiffany & Co,15 forming and reforming. By 1885, though, Tiffany was focused on the Tiffany Glass Company, with studios on East 25th and what was then 4th Avenue and is now Park Avenue South.16 If you’re keeping track these things, Tiffany was settling in just as Chester A. Arthur was returning to the neighborhood after not running for reelection as president in order to spend more time with his Bright’s Disease: his home is three blocks north and one block east.
So, it’s the late 1880s, Charles Lewis Tiffany is buying the French crown jewels,17 Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass is half full, and we have one more name to learn that will blow Tiffany glass open: Clara Driscoll.
Clara Pierce Wolcott was born December 15, 1861, in a town called Tallmadge, Ohio, about five miles north and east of Akron. Her father died when she was twelve but the family was solvent enough and her mother staunch enough on education that Clara and her three sisters all stayed in school. Clara studied art at Western Reserve School of Design for Women18 and worked as a designer at a furniture store in Cleveland before heading to New York in 1888 to study at the Metropolitan Museum Art School, which at the time was new and pretty focused on industrial design. There were a fair number of women students, though Clara Wolcott was the only women in the architectural decoration department. She lived in a boarding house near what was then Washington Park at 32 South Oxford Street with her sister Josephine, who had also come to New York to pursue art. They were a block away from the land newishly redesigned by Olmsted and Vaux and nine years off from being rechristened Fort Greene Park.19 It was the second biggest park in the country’s second biggest city because 1888 means there are ten years before consolidation.
By June, both sisters were working at Tiffany Glass. Clara only lasted a year there at this stretch as she married her fellow South Oxford Street boarder, Francis S. Driscoll, in 1889, and Tiffany Glass didn’t employ married women. Driscoll died in 1892, however, and Clara Driscoll headed back to 25th street. The fancy glass business had been good enough that in 1891, Tiffany expanded to the building next door to his studio as well as reincorporating in 1892 as the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company. Tiffany also opened its own glass factory in Corona under glassmaker Arthur J. Nash. The proximity to Oyster Bay meant easy access to the sand needed to manufacture glass and Corona had a large immigrant population, which meant easy access to workers. By 1894, Tiffany had the process for favrile glass refined and patented.
Back on East 25th Street in 1892, Tiffany formed the Women’s Glass Cutting Department in the new building. It had six employees and Clara Driscoll at its head.20 The two departments—the women in Manhattan and the men in Queens— would work together in different ways across the two locations, at least for a time.21 At least two women painters who worked at Tiffany, Lydia Field Emmet and Dora Wheeler,22 fully designed stained glass windows. Many windows became a collaboration, with men designing figures and women designing floral elements. Driscoll herself describes the process of creating watercolor renderings for the client. From there, the team would create a life size cartoon that could be used for the glass cutters and would be carbon copied and then sectioned by number to make assembly easier. The women cut the glass which would then be encased in copper via bee’s wax and sent off to Corona for enameling and leading. It was an efficient enough system that the company could grow. By 1894, the women’s department Clara Driscoll managed was up to 35 people.23
1896 saw Clara Driscoll’s second hiatus from Tiffany’s as she became engaged to a guy named Edwin Waldo who worked at University Settlement24 and whose brother George was an artist, friend, and sometimes colleague of Driscoll’s. If you noticed I referred to this as a hiatus and not a departure, you are right and should feel good about how observant you are. In June 1897, Driscoll and Waldo went on a pre-wedding trip to Ohio as he was going to be lecturing on his work at University Settlement and she had hopes of getting good at photography, both for the sake of the medium itself but also to have a library of nature photos as a reference for future art. He got sick and then he just vanished. Vanished!25 He showed up six years later in San Francisco claiming to have amnesia, which is the kind of story true crime podcast hope for and also pretty close to what happened to Olivia Newton John. When the whole thing came out, she said she felt bad for his brother George but was well out of it, which is correct!26 That was later, however. By November of 1897, Driscoll was back in charge of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department. She moved to Manhattan to cut down her commute, living in an apartment with an artist friend also from Ohio named Alice Gouvy and another Tiffany employee at 468 West 57th Street. This apartment made a lot of sense for Alice Gouvy who was taking classes down the street at the Art Students League27 and slightly less sense for Driscoll. Before long, she moved into a boarding house at 44 Irving Place, between 16th and 17th and just south of Gramercy Park.28
1898 sees an important evolution is Driscoll’s work as an artist and Tiffany Glass’ output as a firm and those two things are probably not unrelated. The Tiffany Girls were working on commissions for mosaics and windows, but this is the era we see Driscoll designing the leaded glass lamps that would become synonymous with the name Tiffany.
These lamps were wildly popular from quite early on, even when the price was steep. The cost for Driscoll’s early dragonfly design was $250 in 1899, which would be around $10,000 now.29 Tiffany accepted it thinking it was beautiful enough as an art object to be worth the investment to get people talking about what his firm could do. His more financial-minded partners worried but the lamp was sold before it was made. Other lamps would be created with a mold to make the manufacturing of it quicker and more cost effective. It was a balance between art and industry Driscoll enjoyed some days more than others.
It’s also worth saying that Driscoll didn’t really work alone. She would often have other artists drafting elements, especially if something was more to their particular talents. Alice Gouvy, her friend and roommate from 57th street (and later Irving Place) often collaborated in this way. One job of the Tiffany Girls would also have been selecting glass, which would have a huge effect on the color tone.30 I mention this not to take away from Driscoll’s vision or accomplishment, but only to say that collaboration can sometimes be at odds with the idea of solo creator, whether idea was deliberately created as branding or just a Romantic sense of what an artist is.
I mention it too because this is not (strictly) a case of there needing to be a great man in front of a great woman.31 Tiffany was a talented designer in his own right and it’s a bit the nature of firm like what he established to have one name be the shorthand for the aesthetic. And there were certainly advantages to having that one name be associated with the crown jewels.32 That he was quite consistently a fair and even supportive employer of women33 is in balance with the fact that when Tiffany creations were sent to the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, they were under his name though Driscoll and Nash both contributed significantly. Driscoll was singled out for the dragonfly lampshade, however, winning a bronze medal.
Back to the basics34 of the lamps. The bases were also designed by the women, though manufactured in Corona and brought back to Manhattan if there were to be any mosaic elements inlaid. In keeping with the gendered assumptions of ability of the day,35 while the floral lamps were designed by Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls36 the geometric patterned shades were designed by men.
And that battle of the sexes brings us to 1903. The Tiffany glass factory in Corona was unionized: the men were all members of the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union. The Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union, however, did not accept women so the Women’s Glass Cutting Department workers were barred from representation. In 1903, the workers at the Corona factory angled to have the women’s department shuttered, threatening to strike if the women were allowed to work on any stained-glass windows going forward. Management compromised: the number of women hired was limited and the department would no longer work on windows, just lamps. Driscoll was hurt but more concerned about what other concessions would be demanded in the future than the loss of the window work as by that time, the 25th street workshop was primarily occupied with lamps and objets d'art and other small pieces.
In 1907, Driscoll’s landlady moved to a new boarding house at 70 Irving Place, two blocks north from where they had been living to between 18th and 19th, and Driscoll and a number of other boarders went with her. She had a real friend group amongst the boarders and her friend and fellow artist Alice Gouvy moved in as well. With this group, Driscoll would attend the theater—she saw not only Edwin Booth but Sarah Bernhardt perform Camille. She and a group of friends went in on a summer cottage in Jersey. She was super into the new hot fad of bicycling, which meant getting around easily and also less restrictive clothes. In terms of being out and about, it should be said that Clara Driscoll made decent money: in fact, one of the only times she was publicly linked to her work in her lifetime was a 1904 New York Daily News story about well-paid women in New York City. She was paid $35 a week, which comes out to the equivalent of $60,000 a year today. There was a notable degree of independence allowed by this work in this moment. These were artisans who had as much in common with the Gibson Girl as they did with the illustrator who popularized her.
This isn’t an era when we think of middle-class women working, but we really are talking about artisans and this was a factory environment but not a sweatshop. The Tiffany Girls themselves were also distinctly more middle-class than their Lower East Side sisters, and their concerns were more likely to be that of an artist looking to thrive than an unprotected immigrant desperate to survive. Driscoll, as both a designer and manager, found the pressures of the commercial aspects of her work frustrating, and in letters to her family would speak of going back to Ohio and opening a women-centered arts and crafts collective.
In 1902, Charles Lewis Tiffany died and Louis Comfort Tiffany was named Design Directory of Tiffany & Co. The Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company continued apace and in 1905 moved further uptown to 347-55 Madison Ave, which had been the headquarters of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club.37 As such it was very finely decorated which meant Driscoll’s new workshop was wood paneled. By 1915, Brooks Brothers would follow Tiffany uptown and build their new flagship store across the street, just to give you a sense of where the neighborhood was going.
Driscoll left Tiffany in 1908 to marry Edward Booth, a fellow boarder from Irving Place she’d been friends with for ten years.38 They stayed in the boarding house as Driscoll really wasn’t interested in taking on the cooking and cleaning39 and she took up painting scarves as her artistic endeavor. Booth retired in 1930 —he’d worked for an import firm and the crash made business difficult—and they moved down to Florida. She died in 1944 and was cremated, her ashes laid to rest in the Tallmadge cemetery. She was survived by one her sisters, Emily, who wrote a tribute of her life and her career but the obituary listed her as a housewife. That the extent of her work and creative output has been recovered is down to her letters: her family shared long and extensive letters which were preserved by her sister Emily until they ended up being archived at the Kent State University Library and the Queens Historical Society. Scholars and curators from the New-York Historical Society unfolded the depth of what they revealed, and Clara Driscoll’s work was brought into the light.40
Tiffany Glass closed when Louis Comfort Tiffany died in 1933. Tiffany & Co has been sold to different companies and conglomerates since, but in their official history, the company is still careful to thread the needle in discussing Louis Comfort Tiffany, citing his aesthetic as seen in the iconic wisteria lamp. The simple truth is we just don’t always know the names we know as well as we think know them, even when they’re commonly known.
He did put those words into the mouth of a teenager who spends one act moping and four making bad choices but still! They’re good.
I bet you can take a guess when and why they were changed!
This means Louisa May Alcott had a more productive 2023 than I did despite being dead for more than century.
Transitions are kind of my specialty.
Also the name that comes to mind when one thinks of breakfast, but that’s completely unrelated.
“On their own” after the you count the loan, though. There’s obviously nothing wrong with getting help but it’s always worth pointing out that some bootstraps are just longer than others.
Though it would be a department store before a newspaper office.
Not The Year of Successful Revolutions, but that’s not really where we’re going today anyway.
On the one hand, that sounds a little predatory. On the other, so does the aristocracy.
I find it low stakes shocking that a single immediate family would bounce between “Louis” and “Lewis” like that: I thought everyone had to choose a side, like The Highlander but for spelling. It’s why I’m still haunted by the time a living legend told me I spell my name wrong.
Now the Victoria and Albert.
Basically old English for “handmade.”
The wink is implied but I assume you got it.
This was effectively a craft goods market she founded along side Mary Atwater “I Put the Choate in Choate Rosemary Hall” Choate in 1878 that let women sell what they made. It was a respectable way to make a living for the tens of thousands of women made widows by the Civil War. It’s very cool! It lasted all the way through 2003.
This one just seems like a recipe for confusion, like a literal silver spoon version of Who’s On First.
Names! What even are they, amirite? In this instance, the name change was a bit of a reputation makeover: from 1833, 4th Avenue was the path of the New York Central and Harlem Railroad. When the trains moved underground, the rails were replaced by greenery, hence Park Avenue. The length of 4th from 17th to 32nd, where Park starts, became Park Avenue South in 1959 because the business along it decided they would rather be associated with the wealthy of the Upper East Side than the noise and smog of the trains.
They were put up for auction in 1887 as the government of the Third Republic decided it would rather have cash than a big sparkly symbol of royal authority that any lingering monarchist might want to shoot their shot for. Tiffany walked away with around two thirds of what was sold. For a particular slice of high society, buying the jewels of aristos on the decline or deposed royals was a show of power on par with building castles along the East coast. The only better display was buying a declining aristocrat himself, but we’ll talk about the Buccaneers another day.
It’s the Cleveland Institute of Art now.
How right was Walt Whitman that the old fort would make a great public right, huh?
It also now had a view from the roof of Madison Square Garden, which had been rebuilt in 1890. It was in its second iteration next to Madison Square Park, the one where Sanford White would be killed.
Dun DUN DUUUUUUUUUN.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because her mother was Candace Wheeler, who we met a few paragraphs ago.
Not all of her employees were women: they had some male employees who handled messier jobs or the tasks that required more strength, though not even that was cut and dry. She did have a quite stalwart assistant named Joe Briggs who was in an interracial marriage but also had a habit of flirting with the girls, which is a real one-two punch of “Good for you!” and “Wait, hey now…”
I feel like we’ll come back to University Settlement at some point, but for today: it was an organization set up on the Lower East Side to support new immigrants. It was meant to be less paternalistic than traditional charities and provided guidance and education as much as advocacy.
No, really: WHERE’S WALDO?!?
Especially for a relationship happening when divorce is stigmatized and difficult.
Just like Hettie “Victory Leading Sherman” Anderson!
She missed being neighbors with her favorite actor by a few years, as Edwin Booth had lived on Gramercy Park South but died in 1893.
That’s the equivalent, not the current price – a dragonfly lamp was sold at Sotheby’s in 2015 for 2.1 million.
Selecting the glass had such an effect on the final product that Driscoll would be disappointed on cloudy days, as natural light made for the best working conditions.
After all, it’s not like Arthur J. Nash was any more of a household name than Driscoll was.
Some nepotism is just more sparkly than others, you know?
He had also run an embroidery show that had an all-woman staff.
Base-ics.
Honestly, this still feels pretty current, especially if you’re listening to Larry Summers talk.
A band I would listen to, I think.
This is not the same as the Knickerbocker Club, which still exists, but it DOES feature into one of the twentieth century’s earliest claimants on Trial of the Century when a member of the club named Roland B. Molineux sent poison to the physical director he’d been in a spat with and ended up killing his intended target’s landlady in the process which ended up unearthing an earlier murder. The guy was found guilty but the verdict was set aside as the prosecution had tried to prove their point by using multiple accusations at once. And that’s why the name “Molineux” sounds familiar if you watch a lot of Law & Order.
She wasn’t looking for any kind of repeat of Edwin Waldo.
Preach.
Only one light pun in a lamp-based newsletter! You’re welcome. I should say her work was also brought into the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society: there’s a permanent exhibit of Tiffany lamps on their fourth floor and it is beautiful both for the objects and the curation.
Thank you!!!!