Born: 15 December 1861, United States
Died: 6 November 1944
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Clara Pierce Wolcott
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
For decades, the iconic Art Nouveau beauty of Tiffany lamps was credited almost exclusively to Louis Comfort Tiffany, the artist son of the Tiffany & Company founders. But Tiffany neither crafted nor designed them, despite company ads proclaiming him the chief designer of the signature pieces and claiming that he personally oversaw the processes. These materials mentioned neither Clara Driscoll, long-time head of the women’s glass-cutting department, nor the dozens of so-called “Tiffany girls” she worked with. Their artistry would have continued to go unacknowledged were it not for the 2005 discovery of hundreds of Driscoll family letters more than 60 years after Clara Driscoll’s death in 1944. In the letters, it is explicit that Driscoll herself designed some of the most popular lamps, including the Wisteria, Butterfly, Fern, Poppy, and Dragonfly models. She describes making a “model of paper and linen so that Mr. Tiffany could see exactly what [her] idea was” and tells her family that, “This Dragonfly lamp is an idea that I had last summer.”