In a letter dated June 29, 1898, Driscoll wrote about how her Butterfly lamp got here to be. Her thought, described to Louis Consolation Tiffany, was for a glass shade depicting golden butterflies towards a pale blue sky scattered with wispy clouds. The steel base would come with a glass mosaic depicting yellow primroses on stems with leaves of many shades of inexperienced.
Tiffany was so excited by the scheme that he began drawing concepts on a blotter, however, Driscoll wrote, “he wavered off into such imprecise traces that you might scarcely distinguish them from the grey of the blotter.”
“After which,” she added, “he would say — ‘properly, work out your individual thought.’”
As soon as her design was authorized, the Tiffany ladies started working: One drew a cartoon of the design to scale on tracing paper and positioned it beneath glass over a light-weight field. One other chosen coloured glass from sheets measuring roughly 15 by 15 inches. Nonetheless one other minimize items from the glass, paying shut consideration to paint and striation. One other workers member then minimize a bit of skinny copper into slim, noodle-like strips and bent, or “foiled,” them across the edges of the items, so that every could possibly be soldered into place.
The ladies did each step of the method besides the soldering, which was completed by a males’s glass-cutting division. (Solely the lads had been allowed to work with heating instruments.) All the assembled shade was then electroplated.
Moreover lamps, each the lads’s and ladies’s departments additionally designed and executed stained-glass home windows — or a minimum of till 1903. That 12 months, the Tiffany firm acceded to a requirement by the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union, which didn’t admit ladies, that solely union members — that’s, males — be allowed to make the home windows.
However the ladies did design and execute small objets d’artwork, like candlesticks, image frames and tea screens — three-sided leaded glass panels that stood about 7½ inches excessive and that had been positioned round a teakettle being heated by burners to maintain a breeze from blowing out the flames.
Driscoll was good, pragmatic and “intrepid,” the curator Hofer mentioned. In April 1899, Driscoll and one other designer, Alice Gouvy, created the Dragonfly lamp to promote for $250 (about $9,000 in at the moment’s cash). One buyer, a lady, needed to purchase it on the spot, however Tiffany mentioned she needed to wait: The prototype was to go to London for an exhibit on the Grafton Galleries. Driscoll would go on to make three extra Dragonflies, one for that buyer, one for the 1900 Paris World’s Truthful and one for show on the Tiffany Studios showroom.
