Book Excerpt: Tiffany Glass Coloring Book by Rizzoli International Publications

<< Introduction >> round 1898, Tiffany Studios unveiled one

the critical work of the “Tiffany Girls,” the young women who

of the most pathbreaking innovations

selected and cut glass for lampshades, windows, and mosaics

in American design: the leaded glass

under her supervision. Guided by the belief that women had a

lampshade commonly referred to

superior sense of color and naturalistic design, Tiffany entrusted

today as the Tiffany lamp. Louis

much of the glass selection to them, while relying on his male

C. Tiffany (1848–1933), the firm’s

artisans to assemble, solder, and patinate the lampshades.

founder and creative genius, had

Tiffany lamps reached their peak of popularity just after

been experimenting with glass

the turn of the century. Well-heeled customers browsed an

for more than two decades when he

array of products at the firm’s opulent Manhattan showroom

launched his leaded shades, an outgrowth

and at luxury emporiums around the country. A price list issued

of the firm’s acclaimed stained glass windows. The lampshades

in 1906 boasted hundreds of models in production ranging from

incorporated Tiffany’s innovative opalescent glass, manufac-

$30 to a princely $750. An important feature of the firm’s lamp

tured at the company’s furnaces in Corona, Queens. The milky,

stock was the interchangeability of components: with most

multicolored glass was made in an extraordinary range of hues

models, customers could mix shades and bases to suit their taste

and manipulated while molten to achieve three-dimensional

and harmonize with virtually any domestic interior.

effects. With this infinite arsenal of color and texture at hand,

By 1910, the tides of fashion had shifted and interest in

Tiffany’s artisans created sumptuous shades that captured the

Tiffany’s lamps was waning. Though the firm continued to sell

beauty and nuance of the natural world.

stock and fill orders into the 1920s, the period of innovation had

While Tiffany was the firm’s guiding light, he relied on

ended with Clara Driscoll’s departure in 1909. Tiffany’s lamps

a team of talented designers and artisans to fulfill his artistic

were largely ignored, and even ridiculed, during the middle

vision. One of the chief designers of his nature-themed shades

decades of the twentieth century, although some intrepid col-

was Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), whom Tiffany appointed head

lectors recognized the beauty of these objects as early as the

of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department in 1892. Driscoll was

1930s. Egon and Hildegard Neustadt, Austrian immigrants,

responsible for many iconic designs, including the Dragonfly,

launched a pioneering collection with the purchase of a Daffodil

Wisteria, and Daffodil, and may have even been responsible for

lamp, priced at $12.50, from a Greenwich Village antique shop

developing the very first leaded shades. Working anonymously,

in 1935. The Neustadts went on to amass perhaps the largest and

in Tiffany’s shadow, Driscoll was largely unknown until the dis-

most encyclopedic Tiffany lamp collection in the world. Today,

covery of her correspondence in 2005 revealed her instrumen-

that collection is housed at the New-York Historical Society,

tal role in designing and creating the firm’s leaded shades and

where 100 lit examples are displayed in the dazzling Gallery of

small decorative objects. Driscoll’s letters also brought to light

Tiffany Lamps. ◊