Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls

Louis Comfort Tiffany founded Tiffany Studios in 1885 as the Tiffany Glass Company. The company designed and produced stained glass objects like windows and lamps. Objects made in the Tiffany Studios were both innovative and beautiful. They were very popular, especially among wealthy New Yorkers. Tiffany lamps remain highly collectible today.

Louis was the visionary behind the way Tiffany Studios combined artmaking and mass production, but his most famous pieces were created by Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls. Clara was an artist from Ohio who moved to New York in 1888 to study at the Metropolitan Museum Art School. Louis recognized her brilliance and hired her to work as a designer at his studio. It was probably Clara’s idea to make the leaded shades for lamps that made Tiffany Studios famous. She also drafted some of the studio’s most popular designs. Later in her career, Clara oversaw a department of thirty-five women glasscutters who were commonly known as the Tiffany Girls.

Louis Tiffany paid his women and men employees the same wages and remained committed to the Tiffany Girls even when his male workers threatened to strike. But the late 1800s was still a difficult time to be a working woman. The Tiffany Girls could not join the glassworkers’ union and were not allowed to continue working once they got married. Over the course of her career, Clara was forced to give up her job three times. Eventually, her contributions to Tiffany Studios were forgotten. 

The first image is a portrait of Clara Driscoll. Despite Clara’s central role at the studio, her contributions were forgotten over time because all the lamps she created were produced under the Tiffany name. Clara’s work was not publicly recognized until the 2007 New-York Historical Society exhibition A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls.

The second image shows Clara’s team of Tiffany Girls manufacturing the lamps. The women’s department, run by Clara, oversaw the design and production of all the nature-inspired lead-shade lamps.

The third image is Tiffany Studios’ famous Dragonfly lamp. This lamp was designed by Clara. The glass was selected by one of the Tiffany Girls. In 1900 a version of this lamp received a prize at the Paris World’s Fair.

• leaded shade: A top for a lamp that is made of glass held together by lead.
• glasscutters: Skilled artisans who cut out pieces of glass to create designs.

• Use the story of Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls as a way to think about the realities for women in the workforce in this era.
• Pair this resource with Women and Modern Art to consider the contributions that women made to the arts during this period.
• For a more comprehensive discussion of women and labor, pair this resource with any or all of the following resources:
  • The Factory Floor
  • Rules for Mill Workers
  • In Their Own Words
  • Organized Labor and Strikes
  • Industrial Work for Women
  • Life Story: Emily Warren Roebling
  • Waged Industrial Work
  • Waged Work and Protective Laws
  • Mexican Women Unionize
  • Life Story: Emma Goldman
  • Life Story: Clara Lemlich Shavelson
  • Married Women and Work
  • Organized Labor and the New Deal
  • Power Dressing

POLITICS AND SOCIETY; AMERICAN CULTURE; WORK, LABOR, AND ECONOMY