Clara and Mr. Tiffany

In her sixth work of fiction about the inter-penetration of life and art, Vreeland celebrates the putative designer of Tiffany’s leaded-glass lampshades. That would be Clara Driscoll. Some art historians now believe that it was Clara, unacknowledged in her lifetime, who conceived the lampshades. What is indisputable is that, encouraged by Louis Tiffany, she was a major creative force at his Glass and Decorating Company. From 1892 to 1908, she oversaw the Women’s Department; many of her workers were from poor immigrant families and still in their teens. Here Clara is a commanding figure: a mother hen to the Tiffany Girls, a feminist challenging the rampant sexism of the Men’s Department and an imaginative innovator marrying glass to flowers and insects.