The Genius Behind Tiffany Lamps

A New Light on Tiffany  |  Eidelberg, Gray, Hofer

Last month I was in Winter Park, Florida, for my second visit to the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. The museum is known primarily for its collection of Tiffany glass, and artifacts relating to Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Our family friend, Yvonne, had renewed my own interest in Tiffany by sharing two recent books about Clara Driscoll, the woman at the top of this posting. A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, by Martin Eidelberg, Nina Gray and Margaret K. Hofer is a fine companion piece to the novel, Clara and Mr. Tiffany, by Susan Vreeland.

Both books describe how Clara Driscoll (1861-1944) was a driving force behind the mosaic glass creations that we most often associate with Louis Comfort Tiffany, despite the fact that she got almost no credit in her own lifetime.

For those of you who are addicted to emails and tweeting, it might be worth noting that Clara Driscoll is finally getting her due because she wrote voluminous letters about her work, letters that were shared and saved by her family.

Dragonfly Lamp  |  objectsnotpaintings.blogspot.com

Through the letters, which include designs and accounts of meetings, it is apparent that Driscoll came up with the idea for Tiffany's iconic mosaic glass lamp shades. She produced hundreds of glass designs for everything from windows to screens to desk accessories, and some of those designs are among Tiffany's most famous pieces. Yet the only credit she ever got was when exposition juries required that every member of a design team be mentioned. (For that reason, Clara did get credit for the Dragonfly Lamp pictured above, which recently sold at auction for $554,500.)

Butterfly Lamp, by Clara Driscoll  |  www.svreeland.com

The Women's Glass Cutting Department was a separate branch of the Tiffany company, staffed by dozens of women who were all managed by Clara Driscoll. Driscoll met on a near-daily basis with Louis Comfort Tiffany, who usually sided with her as she battled her male counterparts, who often gave her little respect. Despite the fact that today she probably would have merited pay worthy of a full partner, Clara Driscoll earned a modest income and lived most of her adult life in boarding houses. She was required to leave the company when she married.

Wisteria Lamp, by Clara Driscoll  | michellemjones.com

Clara Driscoll ended her life painting silk scarves, none of which have survived. But her letters did survive, and they have recently shed light on a creative genius who left a big mark on our collective conscious.

Clara Driscoll and fellow Tiffany employee Joseph Briggs in 1902  |  Metropolitan Museum of Art

To read an excellent account of how two historians simultaneously discovered the extent of Clara Driscoll's work and influence, sleuthing through those letters, I direct you to a New York Times article, here.

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Clara Driscoll is not to be confused with a lady of the same name and the same time who was the Texas philanthropist who saved the Alamo from demolition. That's another interesting story.
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Designer Spotlight: Steve Jobs

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's new biography of Steve Jobs, and it's a fascinating, unvarnished look at a very complex person. With a fierce drive that was both left-brain and right-brain, Jobs created groundbreaking tools that advanced technology, but which were also beautiful to look at and beautiful to use. He was an uncompromising perfectionist, and a man of style and taste. So I thought that today I would mention some of his own takes on design.

When the AppleII case was being designed, Steve Jobs looked at more than two thousand shades of Pantone beige and was not satisfied with any of them. He actually wanted to create a new shade of beige, but was talked out of it by Mike Scott, Apple's then-president.

Jobs scoured Macy's for product designs and fell in love with the Cuisinart (the image above is the vintage machine that he would have studied). He brought a Cuisinart back to the Apple headquarters and explained that he wanted a machine that looked "friendly." "User friendly" is a phrase that would become synonymous with the Macintosh, and white would become Steve Jobs' color of preference.

Ansel Adams   |  Moonrise, Glacier Point, 1948

At his first house, Jobs had no chairs, but he hung Ansel Adams photographs on the wall and sat on the floor next to an antique Tiffany floor lamp.

Courtesy of the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass   |   tms.org

Steve Jobs was a great admirer of Louis Comfort Tiffany, and he was so intrigued by Tiffany's ability to mass-produce fine art, that he took the whole Macintosh team to visit a Tiffany exhibit. He wanted them to know they were not just great programmers — they were artists!

Bill Atkinson, one of Macintosh's lead programmers, came up with the algorithm that would allow the Macintosh to draw circles and ovals. Jobs said that drawing circles, ovals and squares wouldn't be good enough, that users would need to draw squares with rounded corners. When Atkinson scoffed, Jobs took him outside and within three blocks pointed to about 18 examples, including a No Parking sign. Atkinson was sold and programmed a tool for making squares with rounded corners.

grassrootsmotorsports.com   |   apple-history.com

At the time that the casing for the Macintosh was being designed, Steve Jobs was driving a Porche 928. He said he wanted the computer to look like the classic car. I don't see the connection, but if you look at the back of the Porche, you'll definitely see the back of those later, colorful iMacs.

Calligraphy by Hermann Zapf  |  Champion Papers

While at Reed College, Steve Jobs audited a calligraphy class. He loved the beauty of script, and it is one of his legacies that today we have many handsome computer type fonts from which to choose.

Incidentally, it was Steve Jobs who championed WYSIWYG (pronounced "wiz-ee-wig"), which is an acronym for "What you see is what you get." Older readers will remember when computer type was reversed from black screens!

And now, back to my reading ...
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Saturday in Winter Park, Florida

This past Saturday, friends and I took a day trip to Winter Park, which is near Orlando, Florida. Winter Park is a lovely town, filled with parks and plantings.

Our first stop was the Morse Museum, which includes 250 art and architectural details from Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany's Long Island estate. My favorite part of the (permanent) exhibit was the recreation of the Daffodil Terrace. It features the large daffodil capitals above, made from concrete and glass. The daffodils were originally cast glass, but Tiffany wasn't satisfied with the look. So he revised the capitals and made them more natural by having each individual flower petal hand blown.

Park Avenue is the main street, filled with high-end shops and restaurants of every sort. We enjoyed the skirt hanging above, made from rolls of gift wrap.

Park Avenue is a busy street, filled with shoppers and tourists every day of the week. Look down a side street, though, and you'll see a quiet scene that could be European.

My favorite shop was painted with these Victorian motifs.

In the image below, the lamp is bronze, but the base behind it is trompe l'oeil.

We ended the day by visiting the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens. Albin Polasek (1879-1965) came to the United States from what is now the Czech Republic. He was the head of the sculpture department at the Art Institute of Chicago for 30 years, and a member of the National Academy of Design. He retired to a lovely house of his own design in Winter Park, and left it as a museum. The grounds wind down to the lake you see in this photo.

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