Waves licked at the sand deliciously, sensually, like a blue-gray silk scarf undulating, calming me. A soft-breasted sandpiper chased each retreating wavelet seaward, poked her long arched beak into bubbling sand to get some morsel, and raced back up the beach on slender, elegant legs before the next wave would catch her—inward and outward, rhythmically, tirelessly doing her lifework. I was awash with love for her.
I stopped in front of the house, presenting myself simply, without a tremor. He’d been sitting on the porch steps, but he stood up the instant he saw me, honoring me with elegant posture. I didn’t move, stretching the moment, both of us gathering what each other’s presence meant.
“What are you doing here?” I finally asked.
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“About you. Trying to make myself not love you. Trying to let you go.”
“Have you had any success?”
“Not a smidgen.”
I moved onto the porch close to him and saw the adoration in his eyes flower into a beautiful future, a new life that would begin from this moment.
“Don’t try anymore.”
He held out his arms for me, and I stepped in, telling him with my eyes that I felt the love in him embrace the love in me. He reached into his pocket and put the moon shell on the end of my ring finger.
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
AFTERWORD
CLARA MARRIED EDWARD BOOTH, KNOWN IN THIS NOVEL AS Bernard Booth, from Gloucester, England, on September 1, 1909, in Montclair, New Jersey. She was forty-seven, and he was her junior by six years. He had immigrated to New York within a year of Clara’s move to Manhattan, and was married to an unknown woman sometime between 1893 and 1907 for an indeterminate amount of time. The particulars of that marriage were, perforce, my invention.
Clara and Edward Booth continued living at Miss Owens’s boardinghouse as a married couple while she developed a modest career painting silk scarves with flowers and sunset skyscapes. None have survived. The couple also owned a house in Point Pleasant. Booth retired in 1930, and they moved to Ormond Beach, Florida, while still spending the summers at Point Pleasant. Clara died November 6, 1944, at the age of eighty-two, and her ashes were interred in the cemetery in Tallmadge, Ohio, her family home. Booth died in 1953 at the age of eighty-five.
The intimate circumstances of Clara’s marriage to Francis Driscoll are unknown.
As to whether Clara independently conceived of leaded-glass lampshades, there is still question. According to the New-York Historical Society exhibition catalog A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, “Although not specifically stated in her letters, it was possibly Clara who hit upon the idea of making leaded shades with nature-based themes.” Given that the first leaded shades appearing in 1898 were coincident with Clara’s return to Tiffany Studios, it is highly likely.
Alice Gouvy left Tiffany Studios in 1907, before Clara left, and returned to Ohio to teach school. Agnes Northrop continued to work for Tiffany Studios until it closed, and then for its offshoot, Westminster Studios. She remained active as a designer of leaded windows until age ninety-four. Her memorial window for her father is in the Bowne Street Community Church in Flushing, Queens, New York. Carrie McNicholl stayed on at Tiffany Studios until 1930 working as a secretary. Nothing is known of the subsequent lives of Nellie Warner, Mary McVickar, Anna Ring, Theresa Baur, and the three misses.
George Waldo exhibited at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894. He died in 1904 at the age of thirty-seven. Nothing more was heard from his brother after the one letter.
Dudley Carpenter, originally of Nashville, Tennessee, kept a residence in Paris, where he studied at Académie Julian. He eventually went west, sculpting and painting as a California Impressionist in Santa Barbara. His studio became a gathering place for artists, students, and patrons. There he shaped a generation of Southern California painters. He died in 1946.
Henry McBride became the art critic for The New York Sun and worked in that capacity for thirty-seven years, as well as being a contributing editor of ArtNews and a writer for L’ge Nouveau and Cahiers d’Art in Paris. His keen recognition of artistic talent was prophetic. He was the first to discover Thomas Eakins, and he became an early champion of modernism. His article “The Lost Children of New York,” about the Lower East Side, was published in Harper’s Weekly in January 1894. His correspondence revealed that he prodded and cajoled Mrs. Hackley into being more progressive. He retreated annually to a rustic cabin in rural Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed chopping wood, carrying water, and reading biographies of people he wished to emulate.
Louis Comfort Tiffany continued to receive awards and remained active in the arts the rest of his life. The modern styles introduced at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and the effects of the First World War, as well as changing artistic tastes, resulted in diminished production at Tiffany Studios. Louis Tiffany resigned as art director of his father’s Tiffany & Company in 1918. Arthur Nash retired in 1919, and Tiffany withdrew his financial support of the studios and furnaces in 1928, leaving the management of the studios to Joe Briggs as president, and leaving the furnaces to Douglas Nash, a relative of Arthur Nash. Tiffany Studios filed for bankruptcy in 1932, although Briggs kept it functioning until the time of his own death. Louis Comfort Tiffany died in 1933 in the Seventy-second Street house. By 1937, it was razed and a seventeen-story apartment building was completed on the premises.
The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which he created in 1919 to aid gifted young artists, provided studio space at Laurelton Hall. A fire destroyed most of Laurelton Hall in 1957, including most of the records of work production, a factor that made Clara’s letters so valuable. Surviving architectural features of Laurelton Hall—notably the fountain court and the loggia—were rescued and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while windows and lamps collected by Mr. and Mrs. Hugh F. McKean became the basis for the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida.
The New-York Historical Society also has a substantial collection of lamps, one hundred and thirty-two from one donor, Dr. Egon Neustadt, which made it an appropriate venue for the exhibit A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, in 2007, curated by Martin Eidelberg, Nina Gray, and Margaret K. Hofer, just two years after Clara Driscoll’s revealing correspondence became known. Her letters and the resulting exhibit and catalog served as the impetus and inspiration for this novel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WERE IT NOT FOR THE ZEST OF VICTORIANS FOR REGULAR AND detailed letter writing, the world would not have known of Clara Driscoll, and this book would not have been possible. I am grateful for the care with which Clara’s correspondence has been handled by archivists and conservators, and their enthusiasm in providing me full access to the letters. I refer to the Queens Historical Society board of trustees and staff, including Marisa Berman, executive director, and Richard Hourahan, collections manager; the Kelso House Museum Archives under the stewardship of Judi Allen, curator, housed at the Kent State University Library, Department of Special Collections; and Craig Simpson, special collections librarian, KSU. I thank both the Queens Historical Society and the Kelso House Museum for allowing me to use a handful of brief passages verbatim.
Deserving special recognition are the three curators who mounted the exhibit at the New-York Historical Society that brought Clara Driscoll and the work of the Tiffany Girls to the public eye: Martin Eidelberg, Nina Gray, and Margaret K. Hofer, whose jointly written and fascinating catalog, A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, was of inestimable value. I thank them for their willingness to share their knowledge, and for their goodwill.
Several other individuals were generous with their time, and I appreciate their expertise as well: Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Arlie Sulka, owner and managing director, and Eric Silver
, director of the Lillian Nassau Gallery, New York. The late Mrs. Nassau was the first gallery owner to have realized the significance and value of Tiffany lamps, saving many from being destroyed for their bronze.
The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, is primarily dedicated to decorative art produced by Tiffany Studios. Jennifer Thalheimer, curator and collection manager, was a continual and cheerful source of information during the research and writing phases of this book, and I thank her for her understanding responses to my string of questions. Donna Climenhage, curator, and Catherine Hinman, public relations director, were also on hand with their help.
For introducing me to Tiffany glass and to the process of making a leaded-glass lampshade in a hands-on way, I wish to thank Lindsy Parrott, director and curator, and Susan Greenbaum, conservator, of the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, at Queens Museum of Art.
Particular books of scholarship on Tiffany provided wonderful source material: The Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany by Martin Eidelberg, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Tiffany by Design: An In-Depth Look at Tiffany Lamps by Nina Gray, The Lost Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany by Hugh F. McKean, and The Lamps of Tiffany by Dr. Egon Neustadt, as well as a related biography, The Last Tiffany by Michael John Burlingham. For the rest of my sources, please see www.svreeland.com/tif-biblio.html.
Thank you to Marna Hostetler, my interlibrary loan angel at the Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina, for going the extra page and never giving up in our search for obscure material, and to Ginny Hall of the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Public Library for her descriptive answers to my questions.
I have had many insightful critical readers of the manuscript in its various stages. For this, my gratitude goes to John Baker, Barbara Braun, Terry Cantor, Mark Doten, Kip Gray, John H. Ritter, Ron Schmidt, and especially Julie Brickman, who helped me to develop Clara’s relationship with Tiffany more deeply.
I count myself fortunate to have Jane von Mehren as my editor at Random House. Trusting her artful judgment, and grateful for her explanations, I have learned volumes, and am happy to be under her wing again. I am also grateful to assistant editor Rebecca Shapiro and senior editor Caitlin Alexander, both of whom provided valuable criticism.
Always, for book after book, I have had my agent, Barbara Braun, at my side to give wise counsel, astute literary guidance, and knowledgeable comradeship in art museums. It was she who took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 to see the exhibit Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall, and it was her husband, John Baker, who found a newspaper article about the New-York Historical Society exhibit A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, and urged us to go. Heartfelt gratitude to them both.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUSAN VREELAND is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Luncheon of the Boating Party, Life Studies, The Passion of Artemisia, The Forest Lover, and Girl in Hyacinth Blue. She lives in San Diego.
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