Clara and Mr. Tiffany : A Novel Hardcover - 2011

chapter 1

9781400068166|excerpt

Vreeland: CLARA AND MR. TIFFANY

Peacock

I opened the beveled-glass door under the sign announcing Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in ornate bronze. A new sign with a new name. Fine. I felt new too.

In the ground-floor showroom of the five-story building, stained-glass windows hung from the high ceiling, and large mosaic panels leaned against the walls. Despite the urgency of my business, I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the free-form vases, bronze desk sets, pendulum clocks, and Art Nouveau candelabras. It was the oil lamps that bothered me. Their blown-glass shades sat above squat, bulbous bases too earthbound to be elegant. Mr. Tiffany was capable of more grace than that.

A new young floor manager tried to stop me at the marble stairway. I gave him a look that implied, I was here before you were born, and pushed his arm away as though it were a Coney Island turnstile.

On the second floor, I peered into Mr. Tiffany’s large office-studio. With a gardenia pinned to his lapel, he sat at his desk behind a row of potted orchids. In February, no less! Such were the extravagances of wealth. His formerly trim bottle brush of a mustache had sprouted into robust ram’s horns.

His own paintings hung on the walls—Citadel Mosque of Old Cairo, with tall, slender minarets, and Market Day at Tangier, with a high tower on a distant hill. A new one depicted a lily on a tall stalk lording over a much shorter one. Amusing. Little Napoléon’s self-conscious preoccupation with height was alive and well.

New tall pedestals draped with bedouin shawls flanked the fireplace. On them Oriental vases held peacock feathers. In this his design sense went awry, sacrificed to his flamboyancy. If he wanted to appear taller, the pedestals should have been shorter. Someday I would tell him.

“Excuse me.”

“Why, Miss Wolcott!”

“Mrs. Driscoll. I got married, you remember.”

“Oh, yes. You can’t be wanting employment, then. My policy hasn’t—”

I pulled back my shoulders. “As of two weeks ago, I’m a single woman again.”

He was too much the gentleman to ask questions, but he couldn’t hide the gleam in his eyes.

“I’ve come to inquire if you have work for me. That is, if my performance pleased you before.” A deliberate prompt. I didn’t want to be hired because of my need or his kindness. I wanted my talent to be the reason he wanted me back.

“Indeed” was all he offered.

What now to fill the suspended moment? His new projects. I asked. His eyebrows leapt up in symmetrical curves.

“A Byzantine chapel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago next year. Four times bigger than the Paris Exposition Universelle. It will be the greatest assembly of artists since the fifteenth century.” He counted on his fingers and then drummed them on the desk. “Only fifteen months away. In 1893 the name of Louis Comfort Tiffany will be on the lips of millions!” He stood up and swung open his arms wide enough to embrace the whole world.

I sensed his open palm somewhere in the air behind the small of my back, ushering me to his massive, carved mahogany exhibit table to see his sketches and watercolors. “Two round windows, The Infancy of Christ and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, will be set off by a dozen scenic side windows.”

A huge undertaking. How richly fortunate. Surely there would be opportunity for me to shine.

Practically hopping from side to side, he made a show of slinging down one large watercolor after another onto the Persian carpet, each one a precise, fine-edged rendering of what he wanted the window to be.

“Gracious! You’ve been on fire. Go slower! Give me a chance to admire each one.”

He unrolled the largest watercolor. “An eight-foot mosaic behind the altar depicting a pair of peacocks surrounded by grapevines.”

My breath whistled between my open lips. Above the peacocks facing each other, he had transformed the standard Christian icon of a crown of thorns into a shimmering regal headdress for God the King, the thorns replaced by large glass jewels in true Tiffany style.

Astonishing how he could get mere watercolors so deep and saturated, so like lacquer that they vibrated together as surely as chords of a great church pipe organ. Even the names of the hues bore an exotic richness. The peacocks’ necks in emerald green and sapphire blue. The tail feathers in vermilion, Spanish ocher, Florida gold. The jewels in the crown mandarin yellow and peridot. The background in turquoise and cobalt. Oh, to get my hands on those gorgeous hues. To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea. To chip the gigantic jewels for the crown so they would sparkle and send out shafts of light. To forget everything but the glass before me and make of it something resplendent.

When I could trust my voice not to show too much eagerness, I said, “I see your originality is in good health. Only you would put peacocks in a chapel.”

“Don’t you know?” he said in a spoof of incredulity. “They symbolized eternal life in Byzantine art. Their flesh was thought to be incorruptible.”

“What a lucky find for you, that convenient tidbit of information.”

He chuckled, so I was on safe ground.

He tossed down more drawings. “A marble-and-mosaic altar surrounded by mosaic columns, and a baptismal font of opaque leaded glass and mosaic.”

“This dome is the lid of the basin? In opaque leaded glass?”

He looked at it with nothing short of love, and showed me its size with outstretched arms as though he were hugging the thing.

I was struck by a tantalizing idea. “Imagine it reduced in size and made of translucent glass instead. Once you figure how to secure the pieces in a dome, that could be the method and the shape of a lampshade. A wraparound window of, say”—I looked around the room—“peacock feathers.”

He jerked his head up with a startled expression, the idea dawning on him as if it were his own.

“Lampshades in leaded glass,” he said in wonder, his blue eyes sparking.

“Just think where that could go,” I whispered.

“I am. I am!” He tugged at his beard. “It’s brilliant! An entirely new product. We’ll be the first on the market. And not just peacock featherth. Flowerth too!”

Excitement overtook his struggle to control his lisp, which surfaced only when he spoke with passion.

“But the chapel first. This will be our secret for now.”

Men harboring secrets—I seemed attracted to them unwittingly.

“Besides the window department and the mosaic department, I have six women working on the chapel windows. I’ve always thought that women have greater sensitivity to nuances of color than men do. You’ve proved that yourself, so I want more women. You’ll be in charge of them.”

“That will suit me just fine.”

PRAISE FOR SUSAN VREELAND

Clara and Mr. Tiffany

“The book brims with fascinating information about Tiffany's glassmaking and about New York as its gilded age gives way to a more progressive era. ...Vreeland's ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.” — Washington Post
 
“Vreeland's writing is so graceful, her research so exhaustive, that a reader is enfolded in the world of Tiffany and Driscoll….fascinating.”  —  Los Angeles Times
 
“Vreeland offers a fascinating look at at turn-of-the-century New York City.” — People Magazine (4 stars)
 
“[H]ot as a glass factory…Give Vreeland credit for shedding light on a little-known slice of women’s history.”  —  USA Today
 
“You’ll never look at a Tiffany lamp or window the same way.” —  Daily Candy National  “Weekend Guide”
 
“Fascinating.”— Newark Star Ledger
 
“Vreeland has done a good job describing the tensions within the business and between creative artistry and a desire for a personal life… An interesting book about a woman deservedly rescued from obscurity.” —  Fredericksburg, Va. Free Star
 
“If you’re a fiction reader, you are going to want to pick up at least one of these early 2011 novels.”  —  The Christian Science Monitor, “5 Novels for the New Year”
 
“The author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue here imagines a woman torn between art and love in a novel based on the real-life creator of the iconic Tiffany lamps.” —  O Magazine, “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”
 
“Who knew Tiffany’s iconic lamp was designed by a woman? Perfect fodder for historical novelist Vreeland, who travels back to New York City’s Gilded Age to imagine how it all unfolded.”  —  Good Housekeeping

 
“Vreeland brings 1890s Manhattan to vibrant life…Vivid descriptions of window and lamp production will surely bring readers a new appreciation for stained glass.  And Clara’s battles for the rights of her female workers and for artistic originality versus mass production are compelling, as is her complicated relationship with Mr. Tiffany.  This charming woman is a memorable heroine and, just as Clara’s art enhanced the images of nature that it depicted, Vreeland’s illuminating vision of Clara’s story is a pleasure to experience.”  -  BookPage
 
 
 "As sparkling and alluring as the lost story of the woman who created the famed Tiffany glass lamps, Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a masterpiece of a novel.  In it fin de siècle New York jumps to life in all its gaudy and heartbreaking grandeur and opportunities.  As much a character study of a city and a time as of a woman, Susan Vreeland shows us the new technology that enabled people to craft the magnificent lamps so sought after today, and the artist’s eye of Clara Driscoll  that brought them to perfection."
-- Margaret George
 
 
“For the first time in my long life of reading novels, Susan Vreeland made me cry over the glory
of women's work. Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a noble and necessary book, lest we allow ourselves to
be ignorant of the struggle, courage, and vision of women who have come before us. Readers will never look at a Tiffany lamp or window in the same way again.”
      --Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife and Adam & Eve





Girl in Hyacinth Blue
 
“[A] beautifully written exploration of the power of art.”—Parade
 
“Stunning . . . haunting.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
Luncheon of the Boating Party
 
“A masterwork.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
 
“Vreeland takes the big, bold brush-strokes of Renoir’s personal and artistic oeuvre and displays them with her usual vividness in this eponymous novel. . . . Sensual and provocative.”—Baltimore Sun

“The book brims with fascinating information about Tiffany's glassmaking and about New York as its gilded age gives way to a more progressive era. ...Vreeland's ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.” — Washington Post
 
“Vreeland's writing is so graceful, her research so exhaustive, that a reader is enfolded in the world of Tiffany and Driscoll….fascinating.”  — Los Angeles Times
 
“Vreeland offers a fascinating look at at turn-of-the-century New York City.” — People Magazine (4 stars)
 
“[H]ot as a glass factory…Give Vreeland credit for shedding light on a little-known slice of women’s history.”  — USA Today
 
“You’ll never look at a Tiffany lamp or window the same way.” — Daily Candy National  “Weekend Guide”
 
“Fascinating.”— Newark Star Ledger
 
“Vreeland has done a good job describing the tensions within the business and between creative artistry and a desire for a personal life… An interesting book about a woman deservedly rescued from obscurity.” — Fredericksburg, Va. Free Star
 
“If you’re a fiction reader, you are going to want to pick up at least one of these early 2011 novels.”  — The Christian Science Monitor, “5 Novels for the New Year”
 
“The author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue here imagines a woman torn between art and love in a novel based on the real-life creator of the iconic Tiffany lamps.” — O Magazine, “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”
 
“Who knew Tiffany’s iconic lamp was designed by a woman? Perfect fodder for historical novelist Vreeland, who travels back to New York City’s Gilded Age to imagine how it all unfolded.”  — Good Housekeeping
 
 
“Vreeland brings 1890s Manhattan to vibrant life…Vivid descriptions of window and lamp production will surely bring readers a new appreciation for stained glass.  And Clara’s battles for the rights of her female workers and for artistic originality versus mass production are compelling, as is her complicated relationship with Mr. Tiffany.  This charming woman is a memorable heroine and, just as Clara’s art enhanced the images of nature that it depicted, Vreeland’s illuminating vision of Clara’s story is a pleasure to experience.”  -  BookPage
 
 
 "As sparkling and alluring as the lost story of the woman who created the famed Tiffany glass lamps, Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a masterpiece of a novel.  In it fin de siècle New York jumps to life in all its gaudy and heartbreaking grandeur and opportunities.  As much a character study of a city and a time as of a woman, Susan Vreeland shows us the new technology that enabled people to craft the magnificent lamps so sought after today, and the artist’s eye of Clara Driscoll  that brought them to perfection."
-- Margaret George
 
 
“For the first time in my long life of reading novels, Susan Vreeland made me cry over the glory
of women's work. Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a noble and necessary book, lest we allow ourselves to
be ignorant of the struggle, courage, and vision of women who have come before us. Readers will never look at a Tiffany lamp or window in the same way again.”
      --Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife and Adam & Eve

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.