Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland Page A

of glass that suits us?” asked Minnie Henderson, an English girl, very refined. She lived uptown with her parents and always wore a narrow black silk tie over her starched, high-necked white waist, a different one for each day of the week. Then she would start over with the Monday one the next week. Alice had found her for me at Art Students League.
    “Then go to Miss Stoney, or come to me. We can combine two or three layers, even four or five, to get the exact color or depth that you need. Or I can go down to the basement and have a look.”
    “Ask me,” Wilhelmina said from her worktable. “I like mucking around down there. We got thousands of types and colors of glass all stacked on their edges in wooden slots, thirty or forty shades of green, enough to make a body dizzy.”
    “Since when have you been down there?”
    “Since the first week I came to work, truth to tell. I went during lunch, and nobody stopped me. I’ve been all over this building. The furniture department, the fabrics and wallpapers room, the metal shop, the men’s glass studio. There’s a nice view of Madison Square Garden tower from the roof. Mr. Tiffany said always to look for beauty.”
    Why was I surprised? It was Wilhelmina, after all. Brazen Wilhelmina, toughened by a crazed mother.
    She had their attention, so I let her continue. “We got glass that’s ridged, rippled, bumpy with big and little bumps, rough, and wavy. Some bubbly like with blisters, and some like you scraped it with a comb.”
    “How are they made that way?” Minnie asked.
    I explained that texture makers, like bakers’ rolling pins, are rolled across molten glass poured into a pan at a precise temperature. “Sometimes glass shards or flakes of a different color are scattered before the glass is poured. That’s called fractured glass, or confetti glass.”
    I showed them a piece that had lighter spots in it called mottles, which were good for showing light coming through petals and leaves.
    “Don’t forget twig glass,” Wilhelmina said.
    She had named glass with threads or striations of other hues twig glass because we used it for trees.
    “Take advantage of irregularities and happy accidents of coloring. When you find an area that satisfies you, use a narrow grease pencil to trace the paper pattern onto the glass, and give it to your cutter.”
    “What if it’s in the middle of a sheet of glass?” Alice asked.
    “That’s all right. Nothing will be wasted.”
    I showed them the traditional method of securing the pieces together with flexible lead strips called cames. “Look straight at the end of this came. See how it’s shaped like the capital letter
I
with a groove on both sides? That’s so it surrounds the edges of two pieces of glass at once. When all the pieces are stuck to the glass easel with wax and the camesare in place, the window will go to the Glazing Department, where the cames will be soldered and patinated.”
    “We’re not permitted to see it when it’s finished?” Minnie asked.
    “Not usually.”
    “But you can sneak into the men’s department when they’re having their beer break at three o’clock and take a look, and no one’s the wiser,” Wilhelmina said.
    I pretended exasperation, and went on to explain Mr. Tiffany’s new method for smaller pieces or complicated patterns. In those cases, narrow strips of thin copper foil were wrapped around the edges of each piece of glass. In order to make it stick, the side of the foil that would touch the glass was coated with beeswax. The outer side of the foil was treated with muriatic acid, which allowed the solder to bond the foiled edges of two pieces of glass.
    “After each piece of glass is cut and foiled, the assistants apply a spot of beeswax on the back of it and stick it onto the clear easel. That helps the selector see what she’s building up.”
    Mr. Belknap came into the studio, so I gave the girls their assignments and had them begin. He showed me a small brochure