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For Michelle Ann Noble Moldof —S.G.R.To the memory of my first art teacher, Mrs. Terrio, who taught with immense skill and kindness —S.C.
The illustrations were created with watercolor, gouache, cut paper, and a digital zhuzh.
Photo credits:
p. 40: Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. library.metmuseum.org/record=b1780059. p. 41: Clara Driscoll, designer American, 1861–1944
Tiffany Glass & Decorating Co. New York, 1892–1902
Wisteria Lamp, ca. 1901
Leaded glass with bronze base, 25 x 18 in. (63.5 x 45.7 cm)
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.6932
p. 42: Courtesy, The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, FL.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-5436-4
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Text © 2025 Susan Goldman Rubin Illustrations © 2025 Susanna Chapman
Edited by Howard W. Reeves Book design by Heather Kelly
Published in 2025 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Printed and bound in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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By Susan Goldman Rubin Illustrated by Susanna Chapman Abrams Books for Young Readers • New YorkThis is an advance, uncorrected proof. Not for resale, duplication, or reposting. Please do not quote without comparison to the finished book.
As a girl, Clara loved to draw every flower and weed on her family’s farm in Ohio: daffodils, poppies, and wild carrot. She drew dragonflies and butterflies and even cobwebs.
After high school, Clara attended a design school for women. She wanted to be an artist, a designer who makes things. Her mother encouraged Clara and her three younger sisters to become educated. Their father had died when Clara was twelve, and she wanted to support herself and be independent. At that time, in the mid-nineteenth century, most women who were not raising families became teachers and nurses.
Not Clara.
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Clara’s sister Josephine was an artist too, and in 1888 they went to New York City to study at the Metropolitan Museum Art School. Clara was excited to be living in the busy city, where she could go to concerts and plays.
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Both she and Josephine applied for jobs at the worldfamous Tiffany Glass Company. Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of a fancy jeweler, was known for creating gorgeous stained glass windows for churches, theaters, and libraries. Ideas came to him from his gardens. “Nature is always beautiful,” said Mr. Tiffany. When Clara showed him her flower sketches, he liked them right away and hired her and Josephine.
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At first, Clara worked in the leaded glass window department. She and other men and women selected pieces of glass to fit into the pattern of a huge window, mounted on an easel like a painting. A drawing of the picture contained the different shapes outlined in black, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Some bits were smaller than postage stamps. Clara chose colors for each shape from racks holding sheets of glass gleaming like jewels. The hundreds of colors dazzled her.
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With his glassmaker, Mr. Tiffany developed new kinds of glass with crackles, ripples, and threads of gold at his factory in Corona, Queens, New York. His special iridescent glass shimmered like a rainbow. Men carted bins of the glass up from the basement to the women’s workshop. Windows let in daylight, which was better than “nasty little electric bulbs” for seeing color, said Clara. She would hold up her piece of glass to the window to check if it was the right shade.
Clara carefully cut her shard of glass along the line she had marked, then broke the parts away with pliers.
The noise of crunching glass filled the workshop.
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Mr. Tiffany noticed Clara’s talent in choosing and cutting glass. He put her in charge of the Women’s Glass Cutting department.
A newspaper reported that Clara headed “the only shop of women glass cutters in the world.” Clara called her staff the Tiffany Girls. (It was common then to call adult women girls .) She started out with six assistants, and soon there were thirty-five. Although the men had their own department, everyone worked together creating leaded glass windows.
Clara wrote often to her family in Ohio, telling her mother and sisters about her work at the Studio.
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Clara would ask the Tiffany Girl who was the best artist to sketch flower designs for a new window. Then another Tiffany Girl developed the design into a huge drawing called a cartoon. A third Tiffany Girl traced the cartoon on a flat piece of glass in the chosen color. “Each petal and leaf required precise color selections,” wrote Clara. The women wrapped every piece of glass along its edges in thin strips of copper with beeswax.
Clara wrote letters to her mother and sisters about her work.
“The Tiffany work goes well. There is plenty to do.”
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Then the huge window went to the men who joined the pieces together with melted metal called solder. They would also melt the copper edging so that the glass pieces would attach to one another and keep the entire piece intact.
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Mr. Tiffany and a male assistant designed many of the windows and large mosaic panels, but sometimes Clara created the floral parts. However, neither her name nor anyone else’s appeared on the finished pieces. The magnificent art glass was marked simply TIFFANY STUDIOS . Mr. Tiffany preferred doing things this way, and Clara felt proud to be part of the company. “There is nothing like having enough work to do and feeling able to do so,” she wrote.
As time passed, new ideas whirled in Clara’s head. Along with windows, the studio also produced lamps. Remembering summers on the family farm, she imagined “a Dragon fly [ sic ] lamp . . . with gauze wings . . . eyes made of glass beads cut in two . . . and the bodies made of metal.”
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Her family was overjoyed to hear from her! “One would think that I did nothing but design, but the usual routine goes on and I jump up to look at samples of glass and have conversations with the various divinities from the basement up, assign the work and then keep an eye upon it.”
The lamps were usually attached to brass bases that were produced at Mr. Tiffany’s factory. But Clara had another brainstorm. “Today I thought how nice it would be to make a lamp with a mosaic base, instead of a metal or glass vase,” she wrote.
First, she made a model in wax. “I want to submit the idea to Mr. Tiffany in the shape it will actually be,” she wrote. Clara arranged the insects around the edge of the lampshade. With pieces of paper, she added wings and stuck “real beads in the holes where the eyes would come.” When she showed the model to Mr. Tiffany, he said, “It was the most interesting lamp in the place,” and put the lamp into production.
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“This Dragon fly lamp is an idea that I had last Summer . . .”
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Clara selected crackled glass in tones of blue and violet for the dragonfly wings and blue beads for the eyes. When the light was turned on, the wings glistened beneath bright green leaves.
Clara presented the finished lamp to Mr. Tiffany in the showroom just as a customer walked in and spotted it. “A rich woman bought it,” wrote Clara, “and then Mr. Tiffany said she couldn’t have it.” He wanted to enter the lamp in a contest at the Paris world’s fair of 1900. He told Clara to quickly make another dragonfly lamp for the lady and to have four more ready in a week.
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“Today has been a field day at Tiffany’s when things have swum along and a great deal accomplished.”
“Today we got an order for forty more dragonfly lampshades. I feel quite pleased.”
Clara dashed upstairs to ask the men who soldered the glass together if they could help fill the rush order. They agreed. “Now comes a race,” said Clara. “We are to work early and late and I hope it will be done.”
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When Mr. Tiffany submitted the dragonfly lamp for the contest in Paris, he had to give the name of the designer to the judges and jury. For the first time, Clara Driscoll’s name appeared with her work. And her dragonfly lamp won the Bronze medal!
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“I have just received two large diplomas from the Paris Exposition, stating that I have been awarded the bronze medal.”
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Clara designed many more lamps. Memories of Ohio stuck in her mind, and she recalled “a cloud of little yellow butterflies” swarming over a field of yellow primroses on a neighbor’s farm.
She hurried to Mr. Tiffany’s office to tell him what she pictured. He was so excited he grabbed a pencil and drew sketches all over the clean desk blotter. “The lamp must be tall and slim,” he said. “Well, work out your own idea.” And she did.
“By Friday I had made a model of paper and linen so that Mr. Tiffany could see exactly what my idea was,” she wrote to her family.
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“Mr. Tiffany was not only pleased but quite enthusiastic.” The Tiffany Girls went to work. The finished lamp was exquisite. Butterflies fluttered around the blue glass sky of the shade, and mosaic primroses climbed up the base—which was slim, as Mr. Tiffany had suggested. This was the “sample,” and the studio made a number of copies.
Next came Clara’s poppy lampshade with a different shape: a fourteen-inch cone.
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More and more flower themes filled Clara’s head. Daffodils. Geraniums.
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For another pattern, she remembered cobwebs and apple blossoms from the Ohio farm. City flowers inspired her too. In the spring, Clara thrilled at tulips blooming in the park, and she and her Tiffany Girls turned all her ideas into beautiful leaded glass lamps.
At Tiffany Studios, Clara was now responsible for many jobs. Not only did she design lamps but also small “fancy goods,” such as vases, clocks, and paperweights. “All this week I have been working hard on the wild carrot idea and it is not nearly finished,” she wrote to a friend about a design for bronze boxes.
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She assigned the task of working out her ideas to those Tiffany Girls who were best at making plaster models. “I . . . train others to finish things I start while I start something else,” she wrote.
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One Monday morning an order came in for six “landscape windows” to be ready by Saturday. “Impossible,” said the men, and they refused to do it. Clara, however, said, “I knew it would be a great feather in our cap if we could,” and accepted the job. She and her Tiffany Girls worked for nearly twelve hours a day for the whole week and finished the project on time.
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Competition between the men and women grew more intense over the years. Mr. Tiffany paid female workers the same as male workers, which was very unusual in that era.
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The men believed they should earn more than the women because many of them were married and supported a family. (Mr. Tiffany didn’t hire married women, the custom at that time.)
In 1903, when Clara and her Tiffany Girls were making a window, the men threatened to strike and stop working unless the women’s department was closed. Clara was miserable. “I came home and had a crying spell (a thing I do about once in thirty years),” she wrote. But Mr. Tiffany stood up for the women.
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They could continue making everything as long as Clara kept her staff down to twenty-seven women, and she agreed. He wanted to assign projects to “those who would do the best job,” and this meant Clara and the Tiffany Girls.
Once Mr. Tiffany called Clara into his office to show her a fantastic new glass he had just made. “I am dreadfully scared about it and can’t bear to cut into it for fear of making a mistake,” she wrote.
“If I were a genius, I could do something perfectly wonderful that would take Mr. Tiffany’s breath away and bring honor to me.”
And that’s exactly what she did. Clara designed a lamp that became Tiffany’s most famous. It depicted Mr. Tiffany’s favorite flowering vine, wisteria. It was a masterpiece. Many orders came in for the wisteria lamp, and each one was a little different. “The blossoms can vary in color from one model to the other,” wrote Clara, “as they do in nature.”
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The lamp became a symbol of Tiffany’s glass artworks. Everyone thought Mr. Tiffany had designed it, but the true artist was Clara Driscoll.
finished book.
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