New York City

Join Royal Oak for an afternoon at the New- York Historical Society! First, we will take a private tour of their breathtaking gallery of Tiffany lamps featuring 100 illuminated lamps from their spectacular collection, regarded as one of the world’s largest and most encyclopedic. Spread over two floors and connected with a magnificent glass spiral staircase, the multimedia exhibit not only displays the lamps in a dramatically lit jewel-like space, but also recounts the history of how they were assembled by hand. Though Louis C. Tiffany was the artistic genius behind Tiffany Studios, he was not the exclusive designer. Many of the floral designs were actually created by “Tiffany Girls” working under Clara Driscoll, head of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department from 1892 to 1909.

We will then head to the Reading Room of the Patricia Klingenstein Library for a special visit with Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Drawings librarian, Jill Reichenbach. Among the treasures we will see are a selection of preparatory watercolors for John James Audubon’s impressive Birds of America, fascinating examples of books with fore-edge and double fore-edge paintings, T. W. Strong’s humorous series of comic cartoon lithographs “Sketches of New York,” and maps of Manhattan from over the centuries beginning in the 1600s.