GOING DEEPER



Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 by Pierre-Auguste-Renoir, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Bridgeman Art Library



“Never lose a holy curiosity.”

--Albert Einstein

    When I read Susan Vreeland’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, I was mesmerized by the characters. I printed out a picture of the painting, labeling each character, matching them with their fictional duplicate. I read about the artist, Renoir, fascinated he had found a way to include his friends in his spontaneous, delightful painting. I knew my next trip to Washington, D.C. would include pilgrimage to The Phillips Collection. Such excitement, such new knowledge from a novel!  (Learn more about Vreeland at svreeland.com)

    Susan Vreeland’s new novel, Clara and Mr. Tiffany: A Novel, enlightened and educated me once again. Tiffany art enthralls me. It seems like quilting with glass. This time Vreeland based her novel on letters thought long lost. Clara Driscoll worked for Louis Tiffany. Through her letters scholars now believe she was responsible for many of Tiffany’s most popular and beautiful items. Clara managed the “Tiffany Girls” at the Tiffany Factory/Studio. She designed deeply stunning lamps stirred from nature…peacocks, trumpet creepers, dragon flies, butterflies. She organized and inspired women of their rights before it was fashionable.

    Vreeland’s novel inspired me to again dig deeper, learn more. I purchased A New Light on Tiffany, Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls by Martin Eidelberg, Nina Grey, and Margaret Hofer, the scholars who assembled the New York Historical Society exhibition. “We three had long been separately engrossed in the history of Louis C. Tiffany. But serendipity and the generosity of colleagues, archivists, and Driscoll relatives brought us together.” (New Light, p. 10) I am now studying rich color pictures of Tiffany lamps, intriguing black and whites of Tiffany girls on Staten Island at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, detailed descriptions of designing for “art and commerce.”

     I remember thirty years ago one of my friends said her father insisted she only read nonfiction, “She couldn’t learn anything from fiction.” How very sad for her. Besides all the obvious: discovering relationships, deepening characters, ironic twists of plot, stupendous settings…novels spark our awe, open our world, caress our curiosity.

Peacock shade probably designed by Clara Driscoll, pre 1906, New York Historial Society