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Nickel, Sandra

Making Light Bloom: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Lamps

32 pp. | Peachtree | June, 2025 | Trade ISBN 9781682636091 $18.99
(1) K-3 Illustrated by Julie Paschkis. This picture-book biography of stained-glass artist Clara Driscoll (1861-1944) opens on a bucolic scene of the gardens and "the house on a hill" in Ohio where she grew up. In the foreground, apple blossoms, morning glories, daffodils, and a dragonfly foreshadow motifs in her iconic work—work attributed to Louis Tiffany until years after Driscoll's death. That idyllic setting was never far from her mind after she moved to New York City and began working for Tiffany's stained-glass window company. Nickel follows the path of Driscoll's career from selecting and cutting glass for windows, to being put in charge of "a new workshop of women," to her innovative design for her butterfly-and-primrose lamp. Paschkis's luminous, cheerful illustrations, rendered in pen-and-ink and gouache, appropriately resemble stained glass with their thick black lines, geometric shapes, and bright, rich colors with "dappled and streaked" effects. The engaging text provides an accessible overview of the labor-intensive stained glass–making process and insight into Driscoll as a person (e.g., she read nature poetry to her "Tiffany Girls" to inspire them). An author's note provides more information about Driscoll's life, her legacy, and the five design steps involved in producing her lamps; a selected biography and source notes are also appended. See Rubin's recent Dragonflies of Glass (rev. 5/25) for another portrait of this long-overlooked artist.
Reviewer: Kitty Flynn | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2025

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