Clara Driscoll and Tiffany Lamps

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Thanks to a cache of personal letters uncovered in 2009, it is now known that iconic Tiffany lamps such as “Wisteria” and “Dragonflies” were designed by Clara Driscoll and the female colleagues she managed in the women’s division of The Tiffany Glass Company of Manhattan. Historian Renée Sentilles, of Case Western Reserve University, will contextualize the designs and life decisions of Driscoll within the power dynamics of Tiffany Studios, the female artists surrounding her, and the cultural climate of the 1880s-1920s. Among other terms—such as “the Gilded Age,” “the Age of Incorporation,” and “the Second Industrial Revolution”—this period was also known at the time as the Age of The New Woman, a time when respectable urban women began proudly participating in public life. Sentilles asserts that although she was clearly an unusually gifted artist and businesswoman, Driscoll and her lamps were also emblematic of her times.