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I have long understood that she visited the house opposite Wave Hill that was then owned by H.H. Kung, a banker who helped set the economic policies of the Chinese Nationalists. He had to flee when the Chinese Communists came to power and moved to the house in Riverdale now owned by Yeshiva of Telshe Alumni School (their main building, the former Anthony Campagna House, is across the street).
Kung was married to one of the three Soong sisters, the two of whom were marries to Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek.Agnes Northrop and Lydia Field Emmet were not the only famous women designer/artists at Tiffany Studios (which, by the way was not the successor to Charles L. Tiffany’s (1812-1902) company, “fancy goods,” or jewelry store. Tiffany’s remains a NYC icon and is now owned by LVMH, an international conglomerate.
Clara Wolcott Driscoll (1861-1944) was also a famous artist/designer who headed Tiffany Studio’s Women’s Glass Cutting Department aka “The Tiffany Girls,” a job Northrup gladly handed over to her. Driscoll designed beautifully wrought lamps of many colors, primarily with botanic themes, over three tenures at Tiffany Studios from 1888 until 1909 when she was prevented by contemporary gender norms and pervasive sexism to retire.
Clara Wolcott graduated from Midwestern Reserve School of Design for Women and in 1888 moved to Brooklyn and then to NYC to further her studies and career in art. In 1889, she went to work at Tiffany Studios, where Louis Comfort Tiffany believed that women and young girls (some as young as fifteen) had a better sense of color and design than men in assembling his beautiful lampshades. (The women were paid on the same scale as the men.) She had to leave TS twice temporarily and once permanently. The first time was in 1889 when she became engaged to marry Francis Driscoll. Following his death in February 1892, she returned to TS. Clara Driscoll had to leave once again when she became engaged to Edwin Waldo, but she returned to TS when Waldo disappeared. (Years later he resurfaced, claiming amnesia.) In 1909, Clara Driscoll wed Edward Booth and had to leave work for the last time. In retirement, she painted scarves.
A cache of letters, about 350 or so, has been discovered in the Queens Historical Society and at Kent State University in Ohio. Clara and her mother and younger sisters corresponded often about what was happening in their lives.
In 2007 an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, which now has a permanent two-story gallery of TS lampshades, their design process, and other objects made by TS. The N-YHS owns 132 lampshades, 100 of which are on display, 63 of which are attributed to Clara Driscoll. This is the Neustadt collection. (In the corridor outside this gallery there is also a large display of objects made made and sold by Tiffany’s, the iconic jewelry store. Downstairs, on the first floor of the N-YHS, there is a restaurant named Clara.)
In 1892, Tiffany Studios Women’s Glass Cutting Department took advantage of an opportunity when the exclusively male union went out on a city-wide strike. The women and girls of the WGCD did every step of the process in making the lampshades except the final soldering, which could only be done by men in Corona, Queens. In 1903, the men’s union, the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters’ Union, demanded that only men be allowed to make stained glass windows. This effectively ended Northrup’s and other women’s careers in this area.
Clara Driscoll was famous in her time, but like many other women, was soon forgotten. (See the article on her, which appeared in the NYTimes “overlooked series of obituaries” that “went unreported” at the time) February 2023. Driscoll won many prizes like the bronze medal at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. The only name that appears on the lampshades is that of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The Tiffany lampshades were made and were popular during the Gilded Age, when electrification was replacing oil-fueled lighting on city streets and in homes. Louis Comfort Tiffany had been trained as a landscape painter, but soon turned to interior design preferring to find ways to introduce nature and art into American homes. His innovative opalescent glass, which incorporated color and texture became popular for use in stained glass windows for churches, sanatoriums, and mausoleums. The Tiffany girls turned leftover glass into lampshades, many of which Clara Driscoll designed and Tiffany marketed as the Wisteria, the Cobweb, the Arrowhead, the Butterfly, the Dragonfly, etc for use as table lamps, floor lamps, and chandeliers in middle-class and upper-class homes.
Visit the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West at 77th Street to learn much more about the art of stained glass, Clara Driscoll, and the “Tiffany Girls.”
You admit that one strange thing you’ve never seen is Philipse referred to as a Lord before the American Revolution. That’s because it would have been against the age-old practice of the English Class system. I repeat: He was not a Lord.
Frederick Philipse (Flypsen) was not a LORD. He was a carpenter who married wealthy women (first Margaret Hardenbroeck and then Catherine Van Cortlandt) and became successful and a wealthy land owner. He was granted a charter to the “Manor of Philipseburg,” which was recognized by King William and Queen Mary and granted him the right to erect a toll bridge at Spuyten Duyvil. But his origins were too lowly to ever permit him to become an English lord.
