Her name came up in articles here and there at the turn of the past century.

Clara Driscoll was mentioned in 1894 as the head of the women’s glass-cutting department in the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

A decade later her name arose, surprisingly, as the designer of the Tiffany dragonfly lamp.

Even the top Tiffany scholars, who had scoured the available materials, knew little more than that of Driscoll — until 2005, when two experts separately came upon stashes of richly detailed letters.

Now experts label her the designer of treasured lamps on display in an internationally touring show of Tiffany glass at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, which has a world-renowned Tiffany collection.

The egotistical artist-designer Tiffany might be mortified that the world has learned that most of his signature lamps — much-copied icons of American decorative arts — were actually designed by Driscoll and her "Tiffany girls."

Tiffany "would have been quite unhappy" to see her name trumpeted over his, said Martin Eidelberg, one of the experts who discovered Driscoll’s letters. He is among the curators for the Richmond exhibition.

Before the letters surfaced, scholars assumed that, aside from the dragonfly, Tiffany himself created the leaded-glass lamps. "Or it might be thought that he had an initial idea and left it to an assistant to work out a specific pattern.

"What we found out is she designed every lamp with flowers, except for one brief period when she went on vacation" and had a worker create a pattern using her concept, said Eidelberg, who spoke last week from his Manhattan apartment.

The ideas came from Driscoll, and she presented them to Tiffany for his approval.

Her department created all the leaded-glass lamps with natural motifs such as spiders, butterflies and peonies. A men’s glass-cutting department came up with geometric lamp designs.

Volumes of Driscoll’s letters, lovingly bound and kept by her family, revealed a far fuller picture of Tiffany’s workshops than previously existed.

"In fact, this is the best first-hand information we’ve got about the day-to-day activities at Tiffany’s studios," Eidelberg said. Such letters, written by a direct observer and participant about events happening at that time, are treasured by historians because they are more likely to be faithful accounts.

Driscoll and her family wrote often and extensively in a "round robin" style: One person would write a letter,Tiffany Sets, its recipient would write one,Tiffany earrings, too, and attach it to the first letter to send to a third correspondent. They used the same size pages, ready for binding.

The designer wrote about her life as a career woman in New York, the stresses of managing as many as 35 women in her department and dealing with male workers jealous of these women’s status.

She wrote about having to leave her job twice, to get married or engaged, since Tiffany followed the practice then of not employing married women. (A widow, she left Tiffany for good around 1909 to marry her second husband.)

Writing to her three younger sisters and her mother, Driscoll described the process of design and manufacture of the lamps and windows, and the hierarchy among workers.

Her correspondence clarifies that her own designs included the wisteria lamp, which remains among the most popular and costly Tiffany products.

In 1906, her wisteria table lamp sold for the then-whopping sum of $400. In 2007, a bidder paid Sotheby’s fine-arts auction house about $880,000 for one.

Lamps featuring natural forms were not produced at Tiffany’s studios until around 1898, Eidelberg said, about a decade after Driscoll started. She supervised a group of women called selectors, who selected the individual pieces of glass used in Tiffany items.

Each selector was paired with another woman, usually less experienced, who cut the glass under her direction.

Driscoll’s writings bring Tiffany’s studios to life. As workers in her section raced to fill a rush order of wisteria lamps, a "scrub woman" bumped the easel where thousands of pieces of glass were carefully laid out. As the pieces went flying, six days’ work was destroyed.

"Her letters filled in so many gaps," he said. "What we’re learning is a much more complex relationship between artists and crafts-people."

Five years ago, one of Driscoll’s descendents approached Eidelberg after a lecture, saying he had some materials on the designer.

Meanwhile,Tiffany rings, another Tiffany expert, Nina Gray, had just discovered a cache of letters in Queens, N.Y., that had been in the home of one of Driscoll’s sisters.

Both Gray and Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University, heard about more letters at Kent State University in Ohio, and inquired about them a few days apart.

"Nina and I live four blocks from each other, on Central Park West," he said. "Just by chance I invited her to dinner."

They confided their findings and, astonished by the coincidence, decided to team up. They learned the New-York Historical Society was seeking a Tiffany show, and ended up producing a landmark exhibition with book in 2007, "A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls."

Eidelberg doesn’t fault Tiffany for never lauding Driscoll as the great lamp designer. "Do you think Donna Karan designs every item of clothing? And always, when a new fashion leader comes out from anonymity, it turns out they spent 10 years with Christian Dior," he said.

"Tiffany knew what was expected. He had to appear as the great impresario." His Manhattan mansion and Long Island estate were lavish palaces of distinctive design.

As son of the founder of the Tiffany jewelry store, he had social prestige on his side as he started his own company. Eidelberg said Tiffany was a designer who insisted on quality, a man of vision and ego, but not a charlatan.

"In the great age of mechanical reproduction, of cheap shoddy goods, here is this man who positions himself as the great artist-designer. And his presence, his name, his signature is a guarantee of good taste."

Driscoll worked for Tiffany for two decades,Tiffany Watches, knew his taste and what he loved. She sometimes pulled imagery from his windows and incorporated it into her lamps, Eidelberg said. A fruit-design lamp and her poppy shade were derived from his four-season windows shown at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair.

"Why do you think Tiffany liked her work? The basic idea of an employee working for a great master is to adopt the master’s style and then adapt his designs for further work," he said.

Tiffany fed Driscoll’s creativity, too, once sending her and a few other workers to Europe to sketch in Brittany.

"This is a great deal of respect and honor. They lived in awe of Tiffany.

"They knew what he was about. And all they wanted to do was live up to his expectations."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com