In 1837, Charles Lewis Tiffany arrived in New York with a vision of spectacular beauty that went on to redefine glamour and style around the world. He became known as the “king of Diamonds.” The first Tiffany lamp was created around 1895. Each lamp was handmade by skilled craftsmen, not mass – or machine – produced.
It’s designer was not, as had been thought for over 100 years, Louis Comfort Tiffany, but an artist named Clara Driscoll. Driscoll was the master designer behind the most creative and valuable leaded glass lamps produced by Tiffany Studios.
Tiffany’s first business venture in stained glass was an interior design firm in New York. After this commission, it was Clara Driscoll who thought of using the copper foil method of stained glass to wrap around a lamp creating a work of art in itself. Tiffany lamps gained popularity after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where Tiffany displayed his lamps and the presentation caught the attention of Wilhelm Bode and Julius Lessing, directors of state museums in Berlin who purchased a few pieces to display in the Museum of Decorative Arts.
Tiffany glass lamps use geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, rectangles and ovals to form patterns over the lamps. These transitioned into flowers, botanical designs using flowers as well as animals such as dragonflies, spiders with webs, butterflies and peacock feathers.
It was mainly women, the Tiffany Girls, with their leader, Clara Driscoll who made the almost entirely anonymous contributions to many of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s most famous mosaics, windows and decorative objects.