Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: The world of art and antiques is funny in that sometimes it feels tiny, like when you bump into the same people over and over again at fairs and museums around the world.
Speaker: But sometimes it feels huge, like when you're looking for a lost piece that was last recorded in an auction in 1932, and today it could be literally anywhere.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I'm going to tell you about a time when that huge world instantaneously collapsed into a tiny, tiny world right in front of my eyes.
Speaker: And I want to be honest with you from the start, I'm not the type to give credence to mystical explanations or magic or divine intervention, that sort of thing.
Speaker: But what happened here seems so unfathomably improbable that even for me, it's hard to quite wrap my head around it.
Speaker: Before we get into it, a little housekeeping.
Speaker: Curious Objects is going on sabbatical after this episode.
Speaker: Don't worry, we'll be back.
Speaker: Actually, we're working on a batch of episodes that we want to release as a season, so you can binge listen week after week.
Speaker: These upcoming episodes are all about storytelling, and just like today's episode, they're about uncovering the unknown, the counterintuitive truths, the mysterious circumstances around, well, Curious Objects.
Speaker: It takes a bit longer to research and record and produce this kind of episode, so bear with me.
Speaker: I really think it'll be worth the wait.
Speaker: As an antique silver dealer, here's something that happens to me all the time.
Speaker: Someone walks into the shop and shows me a piece that's been in the family, quote unquote, for a long time.
Speaker: After that, it usually takes about eight seconds for them to ask that inevitable question, what's it worth?
Speaker: And then about two more seconds for me to give the inevitable reply, not much.
Speaker: But when Dan Ayres rang the doorbell, walked in and pulled out a small, dull silver bowl, it was pretty clear this one was going to go a little differently.
Speaker: We thought that it had been given to mom because she had been named for Alice Delancey Izzard.
Speaker: Her name is Alice Izzard Ayres, and Alice Delancey married Rafe Izzard.
Speaker: So we called it the Delancey Bowl, but we really just...
Speaker: This was all family lore and we didn't know anything about it.
Speaker: I should tell you a little about what the bowl actually looks like.
Speaker: It's six inches across, about the size of a cereal bowl.
Speaker: Plain silver with a simple round foot and an even simpler rim.
Speaker: Then there are two features you should know about.
Speaker: First, a square about an inch on each side is cut out of one side of the bowl and has been replaced with a silver patch.
Speaker: And second, on the other side, there's a fancy engraving.
Speaker: It has two dog's heads, a little shell, and then a mess of curves and squiggles that looks a lot like a plate of spaghetti.
Speaker: We could not read the cipher.
Speaker: We tried to read it.
Speaker: We tried to read it, and we had no success.
Speaker: There's one other oddity.
Speaker: There are no marks on the bowl that tell us anything about who made it or where or when.
Speaker: Now, to understand why that's weird, you just need to know that silver is valuable and pretty much always has been.
Speaker: So valuable that it's been regulated by governments for centuries.
Speaker: And in most European countries, that means that regulatory agencies have kept careful control over silver that's made and sold.
Speaker: So most silver has some kind of mark on it, made by punches struck with a hammer, that tells you that it's been examined and approved by the government.
Speaker: In England, those marks were struck in the goldsmith's hall, which is where we get the word hallmark.
Speaker: But in the new world, things are different.
Speaker: America never had a central regulator making sure silver was up to par.
Speaker: It was every silversmith for himself.
Speaker: And so, for example, if you bought silver that turned out to be diluted with a bunch of extra copper, well, it was up to you and the silversmith and maybe a judge to sort it all out.
Speaker: You normally see just a maker's mark.
Speaker: That's Tim Martin, president of SJ ShrubSoul.
Speaker: He is my boss.
Speaker: The Maker's Mark is a group of letters, either the silversmith's initials or his name, in a shield, normally some sort of a shaped shield, that is banged into the surface of the silver object, giving it kind of a recessed ground against which the letters stand out.
Speaker: You can find it
Speaker: struck once, sometimes struck twice or three times.
Speaker: There were some silversmiths in New York who would put on an N York mark as well as their mark, which would often be a first initial and a last name or just a last name, all spelled out.
Speaker: But by and large, it was, you just see a maker's mark.
Speaker: But here's the thing.
Speaker: The bowl that Daenerys brought in,
Speaker: had no marks at all, not even a maker's mark.
Speaker: There's a lot of unmarked American silver.
Speaker: I mean, now I would say probably it's less than 5%, maybe 2% or 1% of the objects one sees are unmarked.
Speaker: I suspect that objects without marks have been melted down more regularly than objects with marks for the last 200, 250 years, and th at at the time,
Speaker: I mean, it seems to me conceivable that 10% of the pieces produced by American silversmiths were unmarked.
Speaker: So if you don't have any marks to go on, how do you figure out when the heck and where the heck this thing was made?
Speaker: Dan knew that it had been in his family for generations, but he couldn't say how many generations, or even necessarily what branch of the family it was.
Speaker: Maybe there's an object like this in your life, something that's been around for a while, maybe since you were a kid,
Speaker: Maybe you got it from your parents, maybe they got it from theirs, and somewhere along the line, everyone kind of forgot where it came from in the first place.
Speaker: Wouldn't it be nice to know?
Speaker: Don't you wish somebody had kept a receipt?
Speaker: Well, when we're out of other options for figuring out what something is, antique dealers rely on a magic word, connoisseurship.
Speaker: This type of bowl, particularly this size bowl, is typically American object.
Speaker: You know, it's sort of 8 inches across or thereabouts.
Speaker: Some of them are 9, some of them are 10, some of them are 7 1⁄2.
Speaker: But it's around that size.
Speaker: They're typically low.
Speaker: And they were often used as punch bowls, but they were often also used as christening bowls.
Speaker: in American families and it's kind of a known thing.
Speaker: The oral tradition and sometimes written tradition supports that the babies were baptized with the bowl being used as a font.
Speaker: And it's not a size bowl that one sees in English silver.
Speaker: It's not always 100% ironclad, but after thousands and thousands and thousands of objects, you start to recognize the signs and patterns that distinguish one from another, and what that can tell you about where and when it comes from.
Speaker: And to make a long story short, this pole has all the signs of a pre-revolutionary war American object.
Speaker: In other words, it was starting to look like it really had been in Daenerys' family for a long time.
Speaker: I kind of grew up with this bowl as part of a larger collection of all kinds of things that we had from various parts of the Lowndes family, because I'm a Lowndes.
Speaker: That's Dan's mother, Alice.
Speaker: and from, you know, generations before.
Speaker: This bowl was just kind of, kind of thought of as just a bowl, and because it has that nick in the side that has been repaired, no one really thought very much about it.
Speaker: It was not something that was held in high esteem.
Speaker: It was just another one of those silver things.
Speaker: What Dan and Alice didn't know is that the engraving on the bowl, that spaghetti-looking pattern, that was actually the key to unlocking the whole mystery.
Speaker: You see, it wasn't just a pretty pattern.
Speaker: It was something called a mirror cipher.
Speaker: You've probably heard about Leonardo da Vinci's code language.
Speaker: He would write on a paper while looking at the reflection of the paper in a mirror so that what he wrote was backwards and pretty much illegible without the mirror.
Speaker: Well, a mirror cipher is when you write something and then write the same thing again on top of itself, but mirrored Leonardo style.
Speaker: The result is something that often looks a lot like gibberish.
Speaker: But if you know what you're looking at, with a little effort, you can trace the lines and try to work out what the original letters are.
Speaker: I can sort of drive myself bonkers sometimes trying to decipher ciphers.
Speaker: But that was where your nifty trick of tracing each individual letter with a separate color came in handy.
Speaker: At that point, it became clear that it was...
Speaker: It was PDL, wasn't it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was Peter Delancey.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Okay, so here we need to add a little bit of context.
Speaker: If you were looking for someone today in America and all you knew is that their initials are PDL, well, you're going to have a bad time.
Speaker: But in 18th century America, it's a very different story.
Speaker: Because not only were there way fewer people, but also there was an even smaller number who were wealthy enough to be buying nice silver bowls.
Speaker: Because remember, silver was really darn valuable.
Speaker: In fact, the number of eligible people is small enough that sometimes a set of initials by itself is just about enough to make a fairly solid ID.
Speaker: Especially if you can back that up with genealogy and show that there is a line of descent from that person to where the object is today.
Speaker: And that's exactly what we were able to do with this ball.
Speaker: Because it turns out, and thank God for the internet because otherwise this would have been a lot harder,
Speaker: Dan Eyre's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Peter DeLancey.
Speaker: And the bull, we're pretty sure, passed down from Peter to his daughter Alice, to her son Ralph Izzard, to his daughter Charlotte, to her daughter Alice Middleton, to her son Richard Lowndes, to his daughter Alice, who is Dan's mother.
Speaker: One thing you might notice about the names I just read is that for a patriarchal society, there are an awful lot of women represented.
Speaker: These daughters were still taking their husbands' names, but they were also taking their mothers' silver.
Speaker: Here's Deborah Bach.
Speaker: She's curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New York Historical Society.
Speaker: The idea of women and silver ownership during the colonial period is something that continues to intrigue us.
Speaker: It was not uncommon for colonial parents, often fathers, but women as well, to leave their daughters either a piece of silver or enough money to be able to commission or purchase a piece of silver.
Speaker: And several of our tankards we have record of that were either given as a wedding gift to a woman and not a couple, but the bride or something given specifically to the bride over time.
Speaker: So we have this kind of documentation.
Speaker: And that has really led us to reconsider the idea of women during the colonial period and the ownership of silver.
Speaker: And so when we learned that the Delancey Bowl was descended through a matrilineal line, it really just helped to confirm some of our initial ideas about women and colonial women and the ownership of silver.
Speaker: Another thing you might have noticed about that list of the bowl's owners...
Speaker: Is that the one that starts with Peter Delancey?
Speaker: Well, if you're a New Yorker, you've seen that name all over the place, not least as the name of Delancey Street downtown.
Speaker: The Delancey family was a very important family in New York.
Speaker: Peter Delancey's father was an immigrant himself, and they were Protestants from France who fled to the colonies in part to escape persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Speaker: Peter Delancey was one of many children of Stephen Delancey's, and they settled in New York City and in the areas around New York City.
Speaker: And many of his brothers, like him, were very prominent, both in terms of being merchants, but also became prominent as officials.
Speaker: So that is Peter Delancey's descent, right?
Speaker: And he married into the Calden family, which was a family of English descent.
Speaker: One of the things that many of the early New Yorkers did was marry into other Dutch descended or English descended families and essentially secured dynasties in a way.
Speaker: We're going to hear more from Deborah later, but remember how I said that this story was so improbable that it's hard to even wrap my head around it?
Speaker: Well, we're getting to that part right after this.
Speaker: As always, you can get in touch with me by emailing curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: Pictures for today's episode are online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: And if you'd like to support the show, please tell a friend about us and leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: At the same time that all this was going on with Dan Ayers Bowl, something else very interesting was happening.
Speaker: See, one of my colleagues has spotted something unusual in an auction catalog.
Speaker: This auction house, which we won't name to protect the innocent, was selling a pair of American silver candlesticks.
Speaker: Now that's not too unusual in itself, but what was unusual was that the auction house said that these candlesticks were made in the 18th century before the Revolutionary War.
Speaker: Now American candlesticks from that early on are vanishingly rare.
Speaker: And this particular pair, small and cast silver in a Queen Anne or George I style, well, there are really only a handful in existence.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a bit of a mystery, but for some reason, American silversmiths basically didn't make candlesticks.
Speaker: I sort of have to assume it had something to do with the size of the individual pieces.
Speaker: that you would need to cast.
Speaker: I think it must just be that to cast, you know, casting the base of a candlestick is a bigger job.
Speaker: And I guess that there are fewer silversmiths that were able to do it.
Speaker: But why once they made the mold, they didn't then churn them out is beyond me.
Speaker: The likelihood there is that there used to be far more.
Speaker: American cast candlesticks, but they've just been, you know, they get broken in 1842 or 1911 and people say, well, it broke, throw it out.
Speaker: And, you know, nobody was paying any attention because I can't imagine that a silversmith like, uh, Samuel Tingley, who made a well-known set of four and, uh, and, and, and then another pair of the same design,
Speaker: or a silversmith like Meyer Myers, who cast candlesticks for the Livingstons, wouldn't have cast them for other people and wouldn't have been making them and stocking them and selling them to other patrons.
Speaker: The fact that the ones that survive were the Livingstons ones probably just means that the Livingstons had more of them.
Speaker: So finding a pair of early American silver candlesticks on the market is something that just doesn't really happen.
Speaker: And here's the kicker.
Speaker: The auction estimate was $200 to $400.
Speaker: Just a quick piece of advice for your own auction shopping.
Speaker: When you see an estimate like that on something potentially so rare and valuable, your first thought should be, I wonder what's wrong with it?
Speaker: And that's exactly what we tried to find out.
Speaker: The auction catalog said that one of the candlesticks was marked by the New York silversmith Thomas Hammersley,
Speaker: who was active from about 1750 until the war.
Speaker: The other candlestick, they said, had the unidentified mark BB.
Speaker: The real piece of luck was that the BB mark, which they did not put up on the internet until the very last minute, was clearly, to anybody who knows American silver,
Speaker: B and then the L and the R of LaRue's last name were conjoined.
Speaker: So you got the R sort of sitting in the angle of the L and it looked a little bit like a B, but it really looked like BLR.
Speaker: That is the youngest member of the greatest silversmithing dynasty in colonial New York, which is the LaRue's.
Speaker: And that's when we knew we were looking at something really special.
Speaker: Because even a single candlestick by Thomas Hammersley would be pretty exciting for an American silver collector, but a candlestick by Bartholomew LaRue II would be a really extraordinary discovery.
Speaker: The problem is, this auction was not happening in New York City or anywhere close.
Speaker: And by the time we saw these pictures, it was too late for anyone to go see them in person.
Speaker: So we were stuck doing something that no dealer ever wants to do, bidding blind.
Speaker: Now there's a lot you can tell about an object by looking at pictures, but there's also a lot that pictures can hide, intentionally or not.
Speaker: And if you're planning to spend a lot of money on something at an auction, well, you should keep that old phrase, caveat emptor, right at the top of your mind.
Speaker: These candlesticks could have had all kinds of problems that we might not have been able to tell from a picture.
Speaker: I don't buy much that I haven't seen.
Speaker: but when I do, I realize why I don't buy much that I haven't seen because, you know, it's hard to get it right.
Speaker: And you think you're looking at one thing and you're looking at something else in terms of like the surface of the metal, you know, something you thought was a reflection ends up being a patch or something that you thought was a patch ends up when you see it on somebody else's stand at a fair, having been a reflection.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And so it's not an ideal way to buy anything.
Speaker: And if we could buy them for somewhere in the $200 to $400 range, like the auction house estimated, that was one thing.
Speaker: But what if someone else was bidding against us?
Speaker: How much should you be willing to spend on something where you can't be 100% sure if it's even authentic?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: How much would you risk?
Speaker: Fortunately, I can't tell you exactly how high we would have gone.
Speaker: When the auction rolled around and the bidding started, pretty quickly everyone dropped out except one other bidder.
Speaker: I can tell you that this other bidder pushed us up to $10,000, but that was still well within our margin.
Speaker: If that person had kept going, I'm honestly not really sure where we would have stopped.
Speaker: $10,000 felt like enough of a gamble to me, but you've got to spend money to make money, right?
Speaker: A few days later, the sticks arrived at the shop.
Speaker: Taking them out of the box was a rush.
Speaker: Right away, we discovered two things.
Speaker: First, they were totally authentic.
Speaker: One of them was made by Bartholomew Leroux II, and the other one was a cast copy of that one made by Thomas Hammersley, presumably to replace an original that had gotten lost or damaged or stolen or something.
Speaker: So there was a huge sigh of relief, and then that realization that there was a big profit to be made.
Speaker: And then the second thing we discovered...
Speaker: That's what sent chills up my spine.
Speaker: And it still does when I think about it right now.
Speaker: Because on one candlestick, that earlier original one by LaRue, on the base, in a tiny little font, there was a little engraved monogram.
Speaker: It read P-E-D-L.
Speaker: Peter Elizabeth DeLancey.
Speaker: This really deserves a dramatic pause.
Speaker: And I'm gonna say it again, it blew my mind.
Speaker: Because what we'd stumbled into in this $200-$400 auction lot was one of only two surviving pieces of New York silver from Peter and Elizabeth Delancey from 300 years ago, passed down through eight generations, give or take.
Speaker: The other surviving piece
Speaker: was the bowl Dan Ayres had brought to us barely a month before.
Speaker: Neither of these pieces had ever been seen by the public, neither had been bought or sold or exhibited or photographed or written about.
Speaker: For 300 years, they were ghosts, unknown to the world.
Speaker: And now, within a few weeks, both of them reappeared and reunited at our little antique shop.
Speaker: I said at the start of this episode that I'm not a mystically-minded person, and it's true, I don't countenance supernatural explanations.
Speaker: This confluence, it was a coincidence.
Speaker: But what a f***ing coincidence.
Speaker: Dan Ayers had come to us because he and his mother weren't sure what to do with the bowl, whether to keep it or sell it or donate it.
Speaker: And as an unmarked bowl with a strange patch on the side, we told them it probably wouldn't sell for a fortune.
Speaker: But as a historical object with an amazing story to tell about early New York City,
Speaker: We thought that a museum might be interested if they wanted to make a donation.
Speaker: And in the end, that's what they decided to do, offering it as a gift to the New York Historical Society.
Speaker: Here's Deborah Bach again.
Speaker: The donation was very, very exciting to us for many reasons.
Speaker: We don't very often get offers of colonial New York silver, first of all, let alone a piece of silver that descends through a family.
Speaker: In addition, we rarely get a piece of silver that descends through a matrilineal line of a family.
Speaker: So even before we actually saw the bull, just hearing the story was something that really captivated all of us here.
Speaker: Once we were able to see pictures of the bull and the actual bull itself, it's a wonderful example to teach with.
Speaker: It's a beautiful, small, but very elegant story.
Speaker: colonial bull form.
Speaker: It has beautiful engraving, beautiful cipher.
Speaker: It has mantling that is similar to other mantling used in Delancey family arms.
Speaker: So there were many, many reasons that the idea of acquiring the bull for this collection became very intriguing for us.
Speaker: As for the candlesticks, meanwhile, well, we sold those about 24 hours after getting them in the mail.
Speaker: They went to a great collector of early New York silver.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Before handing them over to him, there was one thing I had to do first.
Speaker: I don't think you had mentioned anything about the candlesticks before the luncheon, or if you did, it was very brief, and it was a surprise.
Speaker: It was a real surprise.
Speaker: We brought the candlesticks with the PDL stamp, but what we saw was...
Speaker: You know, not, there was no question about it.
Speaker: That was it.
Speaker: And we were looking at two pieces of silver from the same couple, Peter Delancey and Elizabeth Colden.
Speaker: Those pieces of silver probably were kept in the same place and set at the same table during their lifetimes.
Speaker: It was like a double piece of history sitting in front of us.
Speaker: I can't tell you how exciting it was to see those two candlesticks.
Speaker: It really was a great joy to see that someone else had preserved something from the Delanceys.
Speaker: So there, around a table at the New York Historical Society restaurant, after a 300-year journey for just a moment, these two relics, older than the country they're in,
Speaker: found themselves once more in the same place at the same time, and with them, shepherding them along, the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of their first owners.
Speaker: If you ever start to feel like history is abstract or somehow detached,
Speaker: Let me just recommend spending a little time with an object or two that were actually there.
Speaker: They were really there, and they are really here now.
Speaker: And that alone is enough for me to make any old thing feel like a small miracle.
Speaker: Or every once in a while, a large miracle.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: I really hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker: Again, we'll be taking a break for a little while, but you can stay up to date at themagazineantiques.com, on Instagram at antiquesmag, or at Objective Interest.
Speaker: We are really excited about what's coming next.
Speaker: So thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the other side.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati, with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta, marketing by Jennifer Norton, Curious Objects intern is Matteo Solis Prada, and
Speaker: And I'm your host, Ben Miller.
