The Story of Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls
November 1, 2024
Grades 1-4 Growing up on her family's farm in Ohio, Clara Driscoll drew the beautiful things she saw around her, like daffodils, poppies, butterflies, and dragonflies. Her parents encouraged their four daughters to become educated. After their father's death, 12-year-old Clara and her sister Josephine moved to New York, where they studied art at the Metropolitan Museum Art School. After Louis Comfort Tiffany saw Clara's sketches of flowers, he hired both sisters to work in his glass company and soon put Clara in charge of the women's glass-cutting department. Besides creating large stained-glass windows inspired by nature, she designed and oversaw the production of some of the company's most iconic stained-glass pieces, such as the dragonfly lamp, the poppy lamp, and the wisteria lamp. While the Tiffany name might mean little to children, they may be surprised to learn that few professions were open to women in nineteenth-century America. Working with watercolor, gouache, and cut paper, Chapman is equally adept at illustrating Driscoll's bucolic childhood and her later life in New York City. An interesting picture-book biography.
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November 25, 2024
Glass designer Clara Driscoll (1861–1944) dazzles in this illuminating story about her pivotal role in creating some of Tiffany Glass Company’s most iconic pieces. Beginning with the protagonist’s love of nature in her Ohio childhood, the book leaps swiftly ahead to her move to New York City, where she studies at the Metropolitan Museum Art School, then is hired
by Louis Comfort Tiffany on the basis of her floral sketches. Bringing Driscoll’s voice into the story with quotations from her letters, Goldman Rubin’s text-heavy pages also delve
vividly into the process of making intricate glass art. Chapman balances the in-depth storytelling with saturated watercolor, gouache, and cut paper illustrations have a glimmering quality reminiscent of creations of the “Tiffany Girls.” As the subject’s career takes off, a brief parallel visual story unfolds along the bottom of the page, underscoring the role that memories of home inspired Driscoll’s creative process. Driscoll appeals as a fascinating figure in this immersive historical read. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Back matter includes author and artist notes and resources. Ages 6–9.
January 1, 2025
Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the famed jeweler and the man responsible for the iconic Tiffany stained glass windows, employed a crew of workers, including the "Tiffany Girls," led by Clara Driscoll. In 1888, Clara, an artist inspired by nature on her girlhood farm in Ohio, moved to New York City for school. Her sketches of flowers landed her a job with Mr. Tiffany. At first, Clara's job was to choose and cut colored glass "gleaming like jewels" for Tiffany's window designs. Her talents generated notice, and soon she led "the only shop of women glass cutters in the world." Goldman Rubin describes how the windows were designed and assembled, and she provides some history of the cooperation and competition between men and women at Tiffany's studio, including the perhaps surprising fact that they received equal pay. Eventually, Clara created her own designs for Tiffany's lamps. One, inspired by dragonflies, earned her a bronze medal from the 1900 Paris World's Fair. Clara designed lamps with butterflies, poppies, tulips, and flowering wisteria vines, which became "Tiffany's most famous." In Chapman's resplendent accompanying illustration, shimmering with purples, yellows, and greens, Clara is dwarfed by the comparatively giant lamp--a fitting tribute to her outsize, little-known contribution to the art world. A secondary story based on Clara's letter to her family about her work appears in Chapman's joyously colored strip illustrations, along with excerpts from the correspondence. A satisfying, behind-the-scenes look at the work of an unsung designer. (author's and artist's notes, archival photographs, where to see artworks by Clara Driscoll, bibliography, notes)(Picture-book biography. 7-10)
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