File:Corning Museum of Glass - 20220412 - 36 - "Dragonflies and Water Flowers" reading lamp (Clara Pierce Wolcott Driscoll, 1899).jpg

English: On display in the "35 Centuries of Glass" gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York as seen in April 2022 is Dragonflies and Water Flowers, one of the famous "Tiffany lamps" designed under the supervision of artist Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). With a long and storied career of almost 60 years stretching from his recruitment by a Brooklyn glasshouse all the way through his death at an advanced age, Tiffany is easily the most renowned glass artist in U.S. history, as well as that nation's leading exponent of the Art Nouveau movement, with a roster of well-known masterworks too numerous to list. This lamp, designed in 1899 by Clara Driscoll, the head of the Women's Glass Cutting Department at Tiffany Studios, is a rather unusual example in that the glass pieces are joined together with lead came, a more traditional method overall but atypical for Tiffany, who generally preferred soldering them together with copper foil. Nonetheless, the intricate patterns, nature-based imagery, and rich color are all textbook Tiffany. (Note especially the cast bronze flower petals supporting the lamp at its base). Dragonflies and Water Flowers was purchased upon its completion by a collector based in Britain, then in 1971 resold to a subsequent owner who converted the lamp from oil-powered to electric. It was acquired by the museum in 2013.