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Gilded-Age Silver with the Gilded Gentleman
65 Plays2 years ago
A couple of months ago, Ben Miller turned up at the Salmagundi Club in New York’s West Village to assume an unfamiliar role: that of interviewee rather than interviewer, sharing his expertise on nineteenth century American silver with the audience of the Gilded Gentleman. It’s a conversation that we are proud to present to you now.
Silvery was in a state of flux during the nineteenth century. Discoveries of huge lodes such as the Nevadan mother given its name by Henry Comstock, new production methods like silver plating, and most importantly, the maturation of the domestic industry, were shifting American styles from the Englishisms of Paul Revere to the Yankee grandeur that was Gorham, and the glory that was Tiffany.
That’s the metanarrative. But Ben and GG host Carl Raymond don’t shy away from pesky niceties such as the difference between the silver of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his father, Charles, the importance (or unimportance) of hallmarks, and the most consequential question for listeners hoarding family silver in the attic: whether nineteenth-century services have value beyond their weight in . . . well, silver.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:14
Speaker
Normally on this show, I'm the interviewer, and you and I get to hear from some of the world's great experts and storytellers about all kinds of different objects.
00:00:24
Speaker
But today we're flipping that script with a special bonus episode where, for once, I'm in the hot seat talking about my own area of specialty, antique silver.
00:00:34
Speaker
Now, this is actually an episode from another podcast that you should be listening to if you aren't already.
00:00:40
Speaker
It's called The Gilded Gentleman with host Carl Raymond, exploring the world of the Gilded Age in New York, London, Paris, and beyond.
00:00:51
Speaker
Now, Carl invited me to join him on The Gilded Gentleman for an episode about Gilded Age Silver.
00:00:57
Speaker
I had a great time.
00:00:58
Speaker
I mean, of course I did.
00:01:00
Speaker
I love talking about silver.
00:01:02
Speaker
And this is one of my favorite periods of silver to talk about because it's this moment of global exchange and technology and incredible creativity.
00:01:11
Speaker
And it's the first moment when America really takes its place on the world stage of decorative arts.
00:01:18
Speaker
So I'm thrilled to be able to share with you this episode of The Gilded Gentleman.
00:01:25
Speaker
As always, you can get in touch with me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:01:33
Speaker
Make sure you're subscribed to Curious Objects so you'll get all of our new episodes.
00:01:37
Speaker
We've got some great ones coming up.
00:01:40
Speaker
And you can subscribe to The Guild of Gentlemen while you're at it.
00:01:43
Speaker
Without further ado, here's Carl Raymond.
00:01:56
Speaker
During America's Gilded Age, that last quarter of the 19th century, all that glittered, and there was plenty, wasn't always gold.
00:02:05
Speaker
Know my friends, it was sometimes silver.
00:02:09
Speaker
Silver was a precious and sumptuous extravagance and found its way not only into coinage, but elegant jewelry and accessories.
00:02:17
Speaker
and most famously to some perhaps silver made up the beautiful and exquisitely designed flatware along with candelabra, etagere, éperne, dishes, solvers, servers, and dozens of different utensils for the grand dining tables of the Gilded Age.
00:02:35
Speaker
Just take spoons for example.
00:02:37
Speaker
Any good Gilded Age grand dinner table could have its jelly spoons, its orange spoons, sauce spoons, ice cream spoons, pea spoons, horseradish spoons, and caviar spoons all arrayed to be admired.
00:02:50
Speaker
The 19th century in America changed the way silver was designed, how it looked, and how it was valued.
00:02:57
Speaker
It was the era of great silver makers and designers from New York's great Charles Tiffany to Providence, Rhode Island's Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company.
Gilded Age Silver Stories and Anecdotes
00:03:06
Speaker
My guest today, Ben Miller, in association with the magazine Antiques, will take us on a tour through the 19th century with a silvery point of view and share some fascinating insight into just what was found on the grand gilded tables of the Gilded Age elite.
00:03:39
Speaker
Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where we journey into corners light and dark of America's Gilded Age, France's Belle Époque, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
00:03:54
Speaker
One of my favorite stories to tell of the excess and eccentricity of the Gilded Age is the story of Mamie Fish's defiant butler.
00:04:04
Speaker
Socialite Mamie Fish was determined to unseat the Mrs. Astor at the top of the Gilded Age social heap, and one can debate just how successful she really was.
00:04:15
Speaker
She had the money, of course, but she also had a wicked sense of fun, and a party of Mamie's was certainly talked about the next day.
00:04:25
Speaker
about to throw one of her great dinners maymy for some reason that seems to be lost to history released her butler from service in an act of spite the aforementioned butler took maymy's entire silver service from the table which was extensive and included candelabra a parent and candlesticks unscrewed it all took it fully apart and left it all in a heap on the floor of maymy's dining room as his parting shot
00:04:54
Speaker
So there.
00:04:56
Speaker
It seems it took a desperate call to Tiffany and company to send two men over immediately to put it all back together in time for Mamie's bash.
00:05:06
Speaker
No one except the butler and the esteemed Tiffany and company themselves, it seems, just knew how it all fit back together.
00:05:16
Speaker
This story makes two points.
00:05:19
Speaker
One, just how intricate and delicate some Gilded Age silver services really could be.
00:05:24
Speaker
And two, one of the surest ways to mess with a Gilded Age hostess's life was to mess with her silver.
00:05:33
Speaker
Extensive and expensive, silver was crucial to the Gilded Age entertaining battle gear, and the more one had, the finer it was, and the more costly, all of which was one more chance to show off one's status and secure a place in society.
19th Century Silver Design Evolution
00:05:51
Speaker
Silver from vases to punch bowls to salt cellars and servers and salvers and wine chillers, teapots, coffee pots, to say nothing of ceremonial cups and bowls and baskets all became works of art unto themselves as a result of the great and refined craftsmanship and a new era of design that influenced silver manufacturing during the 19th century.
00:06:19
Speaker
I am joined today by silver expert Ben Miller to take us on a journey through the world of 19th century silver to shed some light on what led to all of this extravagance and just what some of the influences were that transformed silver objects into some of the most valued and the most beautiful to compete with all that glitter and all that gold.
00:06:43
Speaker
Ben Miller has been the director of research at SJ Shrubsall since 2016 and is one of the rising stars of the New York art and antique scene.
00:06:52
Speaker
After leaving his native Tennessee, he earned his bachelor's degree at Yale.
00:06:56
Speaker
He is a specialist on antique silver and, as he himself says, anything old with a good story.
00:07:03
Speaker
Ben is the host of the wonderful podcast, Curious Objects, produced by the magazine Antiques, and I encourage you all to subscribe to the show.
00:07:12
Speaker
And we'll look a little bit more at that and talk about that at the end.
00:07:16
Speaker
Ben, I am so honored to have you join me on The Gilded Gentleman.
00:07:21
Speaker
Hey, thank you so much.
00:07:22
Speaker
You're too generous, but I've been really excited about this.
00:07:25
Speaker
Me too.
00:07:26
Speaker
We have so much to talk about.
00:07:29
Speaker
So just to really kick things off, Ben, I always love this question.
00:07:33
Speaker
Do you think that there are any misconceptions that people tend to have about silver in general or silver during the Gilded Age or 19th century?
00:07:41
Speaker
Because we should clear that up if we think there are any out there.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, how long do you have, Carl?
00:07:49
Speaker
I'm going to be very nitpicky here and make a big fuss out of a terminological issue, which is the concept of the hallmark.
00:07:58
Speaker
And people have come around, I think, to the idea that any mark that you find on a piece of silver is a hallmark.
00:08:05
Speaker
But actually, there's a much more interesting story that explains why that's not the case.
00:08:09
Speaker
And that's because the word hallmark actually comes from the goldsmith's hall in London, which is an ancient guild of gold and silversmiths.
00:08:17
Speaker
And we sort of use those terms goldsmith and silversmith interchangeably.
00:08:22
Speaker
And that body, that guild, was charged by the King of England with regulating the national currency, making sure that the coins were of the proper standard.
00:08:32
Speaker
And so every piece of silver in England had to be marked by the hall to show that it had passed regulatory scrutiny.
00:08:40
Speaker
So that's where we first get the idea of the hallmark.
00:08:42
Speaker
It's not a maker's mark.
00:08:44
Speaker
It's not a scratch weight.
00:08:46
Speaker
It's not some other kind of mark.
00:08:47
Speaker
It's a mark made by the goldsmith's hall or by some comparable regulatory agency.
00:08:54
Speaker
So don't go getting excited about hallmarks on your silver when it actually might be a maker's mark.
00:09:00
Speaker
And which is more important, the maker's mark, from your perspective?
00:09:03
Speaker
That depends on the maker.
00:09:06
Speaker
As we will get into, right?
00:09:08
Speaker
I think another misconception that you and I've talked about, too, is that, well, if I have silver and it's old and it's from the Gilded Age, that maybe it's worth something.
00:09:20
Speaker
Can you dispel that myth a little bit, too, before we dive into the history here?
00:09:24
Speaker
Well, maybe it is worth something.
00:09:26
Speaker
I mean, maybe it's worth a lot.
00:09:28
Speaker
But let me put it this way.
00:09:31
Speaker
There's a lot of silver out there, and a lot of it is actually pretty old, and most of it is not that valuable.
00:09:38
Speaker
You know, of course, there's the material value of the metal,
00:09:43
Speaker
But beyond that, what you need in order for a piece of silver to be valuable, it's just the same as any other kind of antique.
00:09:50
Speaker
It needs to be interesting for some reason.
00:09:53
Speaker
Maybe it has a fantastic design.
00:09:55
Speaker
Maybe it was made by a particularly important maker.
00:09:58
Speaker
Maybe it's in particularly excellent condition.
00:10:02
Speaker
And it also has to be rare because if there's too much of it, then there's no competition to try to get your hands on the few pieces that are available on the market.
00:10:11
Speaker
So if it's rare and it's wonderful, then it might be worth a lot of money.
00:10:16
Speaker
But of course, for both of those factors to apply, it can't apply to every object.
00:10:21
Speaker
Otherwise, nothing would be valuable at all.
00:10:23
Speaker
So don't get too excited.
00:10:26
Speaker
And when we were talking about this, you also said, this is a really interesting point, too, because people tend to think that silver plate has much less value.
00:10:36
Speaker
But even you were telling me that even sterling is not necessarily as valuable as some people think.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:44
Speaker
I mean, again, at the very least, it's worth about $20 an ounce, but that doesn't add up to a whole lot for most pieces.
00:10:53
Speaker
I don't want to dispel people's excitement because there really are treasures out there to be found.
00:10:58
Speaker
And pieces have come to our firm through incredible channels that you would never have imagined.
00:11:05
Speaker
Pieces that were
00:11:06
Speaker
literally about to go into the melting pot that turned out to be wildly rare and important and valuable.
00:11:12
Speaker
So I don't want you to go throwing all your silver in the garbage can.
00:11:17
Speaker
You never know when something really is going to be, you know, antiques roadshow worthy.
00:11:22
Speaker
But I would just say, don't start taking out, you know, don't start your shopping spree until you've actually brought that piece to a dealer or to an auctioneer to try and find out something about it.
00:11:34
Speaker
Well, that's why I wanted to start the show with this, Ben, because we're going to come back to this at the end of the show, because during the show, I'm sure so many of my listeners will be digging around in their great-grandmother's silver chest, and we will talk at the end about some of the things that you think people should really be looking for.
00:11:51
Speaker
So I always like...
00:11:53
Speaker
to talk a little bit about what went on before any particular period.
00:11:59
Speaker
And our focus today, of course, is going to be the development of silver in America, really, as we said, through the 19th century.
Industrialization and Major Players of Silver
00:12:05
Speaker
But could you set the stage a little bit by talking about what was really going on, let's say, at the very end of the 18th century, sort of post-revolution?
00:12:14
Speaker
I certainly...
00:12:15
Speaker
And I'm sure many listeners think of Paul Revere, of course, and all the beautiful George II silver coming from England.
00:12:22
Speaker
But can you put all that in context, really?
00:12:25
Speaker
Where would a late 18th century American family have gotten their silver?
00:12:29
Speaker
So I do think that studying silver gives us a really powerful perspective.
00:12:34
Speaker
And a figure like Paul Revere is a great example of that.
00:12:37
Speaker
Today, we mostly know him as the midnight writer from the Longfellow poem.
00:12:42
Speaker
But, you know, even before the revolution, he was already a successful craftsman and businessman as a silversmith.
00:12:49
Speaker
I don't know if you've ever read that book, Johnny Tremaine.
00:12:52
Speaker
I did.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was 13 years old.
00:12:54
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:55
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:56
Speaker
Book from the 1940s.
00:12:57
Speaker
But it's a great introduction to the role that silver was playing in the Boston economy and society of pre-revolutionary America.
00:13:04
Speaker
So, you know, Revere's shop in Boston produced an enormous amount of material of consistently high quality.
00:13:12
Speaker
And at that period, it's all based really heavily on designs and forms from England.
00:13:17
Speaker
The ties between Boston, New York and London are still very, very close.
00:13:22
Speaker
So, you know, English silversmiths are providing the basis for practically everything that American silversmiths are making in that period.
00:13:31
Speaker
If you go back further to the very earliest silver in America, you know, 17th century pieces from New York and Boston, you'll find other influences.
00:13:40
Speaker
And in New York, of course, you particularly get the Dutch influence.
00:13:43
Speaker
So very early New York silver looks a lot like Dutch silver before it starts to look like English silver.
00:13:49
Speaker
And then English silver starts to look like French silver.
00:13:52
Speaker
And so American silver, which is trying to look like English silver, also starts to look like French silver.
00:13:57
Speaker
So there's this... Boy, that's confusing.
00:14:00
Speaker
Is that all what's happening at the end of the 18th century?
00:14:02
Speaker
Or have we crept into the 19th at this point?
00:14:04
Speaker
All happening through the 18th century, there is, you know, religious persecution is causing migrations and mixing of peoples and ideas and styles.
00:14:15
Speaker
And, you know, silver is a great way to look at the details of how that happened and what the effects of it were.
00:14:22
Speaker
But, you know, it's important to point out, I think, that it's only a small segment of society that is having much direct interaction with silver at this period, at the end of the 18th century.
00:14:33
Speaker
You know, we're talking about the Boston Brahmins in Boston.
00:14:35
Speaker
They might have silver cutlery, silver candlesticks and beakers and goblets and tankards.
00:14:43
Speaker
They probably had silver baskets for bread and silver buttons and silver shoe buckles.
00:14:49
Speaker
But some of what they bought was imports, and those were mostly coming from London.
00:14:54
Speaker
And London had this enormous and ancient thriving silver industry.
00:15:00
Speaker
But keep in mind, just like clothing, just like furniture, fashions for silver changed very quickly over time.
00:15:10
Speaker
So, you know, you might have bought a teapot in 1740, but by 1755, it's out of fashion.
00:15:18
Speaker
And now you're kind of embarrassed half people over for tea.
00:15:21
Speaker
So what are you going to do?
00:15:22
Speaker
Well, you need to send that teapot in to the silversmith, have it melted down and turned into a new fashionable teapot.
00:15:31
Speaker
So are you going to send it to London by ship months on the voyage, you know, sending it to a silversmith you've never met before, just crossing your fingers that you like what you get back from him?
00:15:44
Speaker
You might have, and some people did.
00:15:46
Speaker
But the appeal of local shopping was pretty strong.
00:15:49
Speaker
And so a lot of what the silversmiths in New York and Boston and other American cities at this time were doing –
00:15:55
Speaker
was taking old objects, old mostly English pieces of silver and refashioning them to keep up with the times.
00:16:02
Speaker
You know, walk the piece down to Paul Revere's shop, get it back a couple of weeks later, and Bob's your uncle.
00:16:09
Speaker
So they were still essentially copying English design at this point, right?
00:16:15
Speaker
A real American style of silver was still yet to emerge.
00:16:19
Speaker
Am I correct about that?
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, in broad strokes, there were differences.
00:16:23
Speaker
And once you've looked at enough thousands of pieces of American and English silver, you'll start to see the sort of subtleties that distinguish one from the other.
00:16:32
Speaker
You know, some differences weren't so subtle, actually.
00:16:35
Speaker
American coffee pots tended to be much larger than English coffee pots, just to take an example.
00:16:41
Speaker
But the overall form, the profile of the pot, in most cases, was pretty similar to what was coming out of England.
00:16:49
Speaker
Now, when you and I first started chatting about this show a number of weeks ago, you had said, well, yes, but it's really the 1830s, 1840s.
00:16:57
Speaker
Once we get into the 19th century a little bit, that some interesting things start to happen.
00:17:03
Speaker
So can you talk about that period and what was going on then?
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a really interesting period in the evolution of silver, and that goes for both Europe and America, because you've got rapidly industrializing society, you've got railroads and factories, steam power, you know, production methods were a big part of that.
00:17:23
Speaker
So the old style of commerce, which was based on your sort of individual craftspeople working in relatively small shops with relatively few employees, that was starting to go the way of the dodo.
00:17:36
Speaker
And in their place, you started to see these larger scale operations.
00:17:39
Speaker
People like Paul Revere had actually already started to move in that direction a generation or two earlier.
00:17:45
Speaker
But by the 1830s, the pace of that change is really, really quick.
00:17:49
Speaker
So you've got, you know, rolling mills that are automating one of the silversmith's most time consuming tasks, which is pounding out an ingot into a sheet.
00:17:59
Speaker
If you can imagine doing that by hand with a hammer, yeah, it's incredibly demanding, laborious, time-consuming.
00:18:06
Speaker
Once you've got a rolling mill that can do that for you, it allows you to turn out so much more material.
00:18:12
Speaker
You've got fewer bespoke orders and more production lines.
00:18:17
Speaker
And a huge part of the story here is that the relative cost of labor versus material is
00:18:24
Speaker
was flipping upside down.
00:18:27
Speaker
For all of history up to that point, the market value of labor, even very skilled labor like an experienced silversmith, that was really a pittance compared to the material value of silver and gold.
00:18:40
Speaker
So if you look at 18th century registers, you can see the cost of making an object listed at 10%, 20% of the cost of buying the raw material to make it out of.
00:18:55
Speaker
So, you know, the cost of acquiring a certain amount of silver was enormous, but the cost of hiring the silversmith to spend hours or days or weeks fashioning it was really small by comparison.
00:19:06
Speaker
So, you know, over the course of the 19th century, that really changes and labor starts to get way more expensive and silver gets way less expensive.
00:19:15
Speaker
And I think we're going to talk later about the supply part of that equation.
00:19:19
Speaker
But you've got new mines and mining techniques that were bringing much more bullion to the market.
00:19:25
Speaker
So it became really important for a silversmith to reduce the amount of work that was actually needed to make these objects.
00:19:35
Speaker
And one of the consequences of that is that silver becomes increasingly accessible to not just the top tenth of a percent, but to the upper middle class.
00:19:45
Speaker
And so, you know, by the turn of the 20th century and as we move into the Gilded Age, silver starts to become actually a sort of attainable household good for even for average American families.
00:20:00
Speaker
So I saw a set of flatware, it was a museum piece that was done in the 1840s.
00:20:08
Speaker
And one of the big surprises was that it was silver plate, that it wasn't sterling silver.
00:20:13
Speaker
Can you talk about that?
00:20:14
Speaker
Because my understanding was that this was very desirable because this was a new technology at the time.
00:20:20
Speaker
So what was happening in the 1840s or so?
00:20:24
Speaker
And how did silver plates start?
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, so this is one of those great stories of accidental discovery.
00:20:30
Speaker
Back in the 1740s, there was a craftsman in Sheffield, England.
00:20:35
Speaker
His name was Thomas Bolziver, and a customer had brought a knife in to him to have it repaired.
00:20:42
Speaker
The knife handle was broken and the knife handle was made out of silver and he put it in a copper vise.
00:20:48
Speaker
Then he heated it up to try to repair the handle.
00:20:52
Speaker
But he heated it up a little too much, and the silver actually was just on the verge of melting.
00:20:58
Speaker
And when he cooled it down and tried to get it back out of the vice, he found that the silver from the knife handle and the copper from the vice had fused together seamlessly to the point he couldn't get them apart at all.
00:21:12
Speaker
He thought, oh, that's interesting.
00:21:14
Speaker
He started playing around, experimenting a bit.
00:21:16
Speaker
And after a while, he came across this, he developed this technique that
00:21:21
Speaker
for fusing together a very thin sheet of silver with a thicker sheet of copper.
00:21:29
Speaker
And they fuse together so perfectly that you can actually hammer that sheet just like you would hammer a sheet of pure silver, which meant that you could make pieces in the same way that you would make a piece of silver that would have that silver appearance, but which had much, much lower raw material costs.
00:21:48
Speaker
So this became a wildly successful commercial enterprise.
00:21:52
Speaker
And by the 1780s and 90s, huge quantities of this stuff was being produced in Sheffield.
00:21:57
Speaker
And it became known as Old Sheffield Plate.
00:22:01
Speaker
It was an industrial process and it required specialized machinery.
00:22:05
Speaker
So you don't see much Old Sheffield Plate being made in America.
00:22:11
Speaker
And then by the middle of the 19th century, there's a new technological revolution, which was spearheaded by the firm Elkington and Company in Birmingham, England.
00:22:22
Speaker
And they developed what we now know as electroplating, where you actually use an electrochemical process to deposit an even thinner sort of molecular process.
00:22:31
Speaker
sheet of silver over the top of even a very complex object.
00:22:36
Speaker
So by the time of the Gilded Age, old Sheffield plate was, as far as I know, was not really being produced in any meaningful quantities, but electroplate had started to replace it.
00:22:47
Speaker
So it sounds like what's really happening here is the industrialization of the silver manufacturing business, right?
00:22:54
Speaker
Like everything else at the time.
00:22:55
Speaker
Now, it really certainly seems to me like the greatest name in 19th century silver, of course, was Tiffany.
00:23:04
Speaker
So let's spend some time on Tiffany, shall we?
00:23:06
Speaker
Because some people may not realize that they were actually two Tiffany's.
00:23:09
Speaker
There was Charles Lewis Tiffany, and then there was Lewis Comfort Tiffany.
00:23:13
Speaker
So can you talk about the two Tiffany's, who was who, and what the contributions of each were, and how that fits into the story of Silver here?
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:23:24
Speaker
And thanks for bringing that up, because it is a very common source of confusion.
00:23:28
Speaker
So Charles Tiffany was the founder of Tiffany and Company, and that's the company we know today.
00:23:34
Speaker
He started that firm back in 1837.
00:23:35
Speaker
And that company is specialized in silver and jewelry, as they still do today.
00:23:41
Speaker
Although, you know, of course, now their silver manufacturing looks very different from what it looked like in the 19th century.
00:23:47
Speaker
We'll get into that.
00:23:49
Speaker
Charles' son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, set off on his own and he had a special interest in stained glass and interior design.
00:23:57
Speaker
And, you know, ultimately it's his company, which he called Tiffany Studios, which makes the famous Tiffany lamps and such.
00:24:04
Speaker
You know, it's a bit complicated because Louis Comfort Tiffany actually did work for Tiffany and company for some time.
00:24:11
Speaker
But that's the basic idea, two separate companies with their own areas of specialty.
00:24:16
Speaker
And, you know, a lot of people don't realize, you know, in the 1870s and up through the early 20th century, Tiffany and Company brought about an absolute revolution in style, not just in America either, but also in Europe.
00:24:32
Speaker
But, you know, it started out as a fairly ordinary New York City retailer.
00:24:37
Speaker
They didn't even make most of their own silver.
00:24:39
Speaker
They hired other silversmiths to make pieces that they then sold out of their shop.
00:24:45
Speaker
But by the 1870s, they had 500 people working in their manufacturing downtown in Manhattan.
00:24:51
Speaker
So how did Charles think about silver?
00:24:54
Speaker
It seems like in many ways he created a revolution in silver.
00:24:57
Speaker
Was it simply from a design point of view?
00:25:00
Speaker
He was obviously at the right place at the right time because as this money was flooding into New York and America, people wanted to, as I said in the intro, show off their wealth.
00:25:08
Speaker
So there was an opportunity to create many more pieces than certainly there had been in earlier years.
Silver Design Influence and Global Impact
00:25:15
Speaker
But what was his revolution in silver?
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:25:18
Speaker
I mean, what you see over the course of the 1830s, 40s, 50s is America coming into its own economically.
00:25:27
Speaker
And what that meant was a huge increase in the quantity of silver that was being produced and used in this country.
00:25:35
Speaker
You know, this was a country that was coming out of a great bullion shortage.
00:25:40
Speaker
That was one of the causes of the American Revolution was the lack of currency, physical currency that was available for use.
00:25:47
Speaker
But by the middle of the 19th century, again, things were turning a bit upside down economically.
00:25:53
Speaker
You started to have much more.
00:25:55
Speaker
Larger supplies, much larger availability, and because of the improved production methods, a company like Tiffany that was positioned to take advantage of those changes, that could hire a large number of people and acquire the right tools and equipment, they could scale up to a degree that craftspeople before that just couldn't even have conceived of.
00:26:17
Speaker
Now, we're going to come back to Tiffany in just a few minutes, but what about some other manufacturers at the time?
00:26:23
Speaker
Can you talk about, for example, Gorham came on the market and there were some others.
00:26:28
Speaker
I think that's going to be interesting to people because we only think of Tiffany, but there were some others in this game too.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:26:36
Speaker
You had firms trying to do really ambitious silversmithing work all up and down the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts down to Baltimore.
00:26:47
Speaker
And some of these firms became household names.
00:26:49
Speaker
You have Whiting and Company.
00:26:51
Speaker
You have Samuel Kirk.
00:26:53
Speaker
Gorham is a really important one because they were one of the only firms that could really stand toe to toe with Tiffany, at least when it came to the very top end of what they were producing.
00:27:04
Speaker
And once again, like Tiffany, you know, they started as a small shop in Newport, Rhode Island, primarily selling spoons.
00:27:11
Speaker
But it was in 1848 that Jabez Gorham had founded the firm.
00:27:15
Speaker
He stepped down, sold the company to his son, and John, his son, had great ambitions for the firm.
00:27:24
Speaker
Right away, they started to expand rapidly.
00:27:27
Speaker
They moved away from the traditions of small-scale craftsmen and the apprenticeship model.
00:27:32
Speaker
They started to manufacture a wide variety of products, hollowware.
00:27:36
Speaker
You know, it wasn't just spoons anymore.
00:27:39
Speaker
And they were using steam power.
00:27:41
Speaker
They were one of the first silversmithing outfits to adopt steam power in their production and other methods of automation and industrialization.
00:27:51
Speaker
And right away, you know, Gorham was also starting to think more ambitiously about design.
00:27:56
Speaker
They didn't just want to be selling objects.
00:27:59
Speaker
They wanted to be selling eye-catching, recognizable objects, not just meeting the demands of contemporary taste, but actually trying to shape that taste themselves.
00:28:09
Speaker
So they hired a design director.
00:28:11
Speaker
They staffed a design department.
00:28:13
Speaker
And by the time of the Civil War, Gorham was widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with.
00:28:20
Speaker
Their silver could be found in the Lincoln White House.
00:28:23
Speaker
And their fortunes only rose from there.
00:28:26
Speaker
Were they rising above Tiffany?
00:28:28
Speaker
I mean, who was winning this game?
00:28:30
Speaker
That depends on who you ask.
00:28:32
Speaker
If you ask me, it was Tiffany.
00:28:33
Speaker
Gorham did produce some truly remarkable objects.
00:28:38
Speaker
There is, you know, the Hiawatha's boat, which is this wonderful, evocative object that President Ulysses Grant's wife purchased from them at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
00:28:50
Speaker
They made the legendary century vase, which was sort of an encapsulation of American idealism and history and an object that was also exhibited in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exhibition 1876.
00:29:04
Speaker
And, you know, of course, this is the firm that would go on to create the famous Martellay line, which was inspired by the arts and crafts movement.
00:29:12
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:29:14
Speaker
Can you define that?
00:29:15
Speaker
So Martellet is one of the, I would say Martellet is one of the more recognizable terms in the history of American silver, even though it's a French word.
00:29:24
Speaker
It essentially is used to mean hand hammered.
00:29:27
Speaker
So the way Gorham used that term was to suggest that these are pieces that are not just handcrafted, but that show off the fact that they're handcrafted.
00:29:38
Speaker
So they're often incredibly ornate.
00:29:42
Speaker
They're full of swirls.
00:29:43
Speaker
They're full of facets.
00:29:46
Speaker
They are difficult to look at without imagining the silversmith's hammer making its blows across the surface.
00:29:54
Speaker
It's a word that was used in their studio for some time before they actually started to use it as a marketing term.
00:30:01
Speaker
But they found it was a very successful marketing term, which is evidenced by the fact that people still talk about it today.
00:30:07
Speaker
And it's, you know, this is all coming out of the arts and crafts movement, which is trying to reverse this trend toward automation and industrialization and refocus the concept of silversmithing around the idea of the individual craftsman.
00:30:24
Speaker
So when we look at pieces of silver by Tiffany next to piece of silver by Gorham, are there things that we, with our untrained eyes, should be aware of that we can start to look at to distinguish some of the quality and the differences between the two?
00:30:38
Speaker
I think the best way to think about this is on a period by period basis, because there are historical moments when Gorham and Tiffany are both putting out pieces that are pursuing very similar stylistic concepts.
00:30:53
Speaker
This is another area where, after looking at thousands of objects, you start to develop a bit of an intuition for it.
00:31:01
Speaker
As a rule of thumb, Gorham did a lot more work in copper.
00:31:05
Speaker
They also, they didn't just work in copper and silver either.
00:31:09
Speaker
They were famous for producing large scale bronzes.
00:31:12
Speaker
So they had really taken on metalworking at every scale and in every context.
00:31:19
Speaker
But Tiffany would incorporate other metals into their work, copper and gold and their own proprietary alloys.
00:31:27
Speaker
Gorham really featured some of those secondary metals in a way that it's rare to find in Tiffany objects.
00:31:34
Speaker
And with that, Ben and I are going to take a little break and we will be back to continue our story of silver.
00:31:45
Speaker
This episode is supported by the International Society of Appraisers, a nonprofit association of experts, connoisseurs, and educators who want to remind you that priceless isn't to value.
00:31:57
Speaker
And they can help you find out what it's really worth.
00:32:00
Speaker
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00:32:09
Speaker
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00:32:15
Speaker
And they're trained in valuation for insurance coverage and claims, charitable donations, state tax, and more.
00:32:23
Speaker
Visit isa-appraisers.org or International Society of Appraisers on Instagram.
00:32:31
Speaker
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00:32:35
Speaker
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00:32:47
Speaker
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00:32:55
Speaker
Again, that's isa-appraisers.org.
00:33:07
Speaker
And we're back.
00:33:08
Speaker
I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast.
00:33:11
Speaker
And today we are taking a look at silver, not only in the Gilded Age, but throughout the 19th century in America.
00:33:17
Speaker
And I'm joined by silver expert and host of the Curious Objects podcast, Ben Miller.
00:33:26
Speaker
So I'd like to jump ahead a little bit, really, to the very beginnings of the Gilded Age.
00:33:31
Speaker
We've talked a little bit around this, but I want to really dive in here.
00:33:34
Speaker
So we're talking about the late 1870s.
00:33:37
Speaker
And again, Ben, you and I were talking, and you had really reinforced the idea of the great world expositions that were certainly going on in the 19th century and into the 20th century.
00:33:48
Speaker
So can you talk about, first of all,
00:33:50
Speaker
these world expositions in general, and really share with listeners what they were, and most importantly, how important they were.
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:01
Speaker
So the first thing to say about that is there were many, many, many world fairs and expositions from the mid 19th century through the early 20th century, both in Europe and America, certainly over 100.
00:34:15
Speaker
So there's a lot of variation, but the core idea was pretty consistent.
00:34:20
Speaker
And that was these were commercial enterprises with patriotic flavor.
00:34:26
Speaker
So the idea was to showcase great achievements in technology and industry and craft and art.
00:34:33
Speaker
And for a designer or manufacturer, this was an unparalleled opportunity to show off your talents and innovations.
00:34:40
Speaker
Huge, huge numbers of people attended these fairs.
00:34:44
Speaker
And of course, many of the attendees were extremely influential figures in the world of art criticism.
00:34:51
Speaker
So the prizes that were often awarded at these fairs were extremely prestigious, but just catching the eye of the right person, you know, an important critic or an important society figure, you know, that could lead you and your company to enormous influence and success.
00:35:09
Speaker
I mean, what I find fascinating about it, this was the 19th century version of the greatest marketing machine ever built, right?
00:35:15
Speaker
I mean, because we didn't have the media that we, of course, have today, this was the only opportunity for people to market themselves, their designs, their wares to an international audience.
00:35:25
Speaker
Am I right about that?
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker
I mean, these were such exciting events.
00:35:30
Speaker
They were planned for years.
00:35:32
Speaker
Entire campuses were built to host them.
00:35:35
Speaker
You had...
00:35:36
Speaker
thousands and thousands of exhibitors, yeah, nobody wanted to miss the World's Fair.
00:35:41
Speaker
Now, one of the things I'm really anxious to talk to you about in terms of the design of silver, and it spilled over into other objects as well, but it's this notion of exoticism, this sort of influence of Asia and certainly other parts of the world that was certainly cropping up in the design of silver and other objects.
00:36:01
Speaker
Can you talk about that?
00:36:03
Speaker
Because that fits into this right at this point in history, too.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:08
Speaker
I mean, as you can tell by walking through the British Museum, the European fascination with the exotic is nothing remotely new.
00:36:15
Speaker
And, you know, it wasn't just taking things from far off lands and bringing them home.
00:36:20
Speaker
It was also taking materials and inspiration.
00:36:23
Speaker
And so you see ostrich eggs and coconuts and tortoiseshell used in British and European decorative arts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
00:36:32
Speaker
But
00:36:33
Speaker
You know, in the late 19th century, that interest really exploded and it was a reflection of rapidly expanding global trade.
00:36:42
Speaker
You had steamships, which were dramatically shortening shipping routes around the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty.
00:36:54
Speaker
You know, they were reaping tremendous rewards from their increasing participation in the global economy.
00:37:01
Speaker
So there was this great proliferation of the exchange of materials, techniques, styles, designs, and you see that influence even in French art.
00:37:12
Speaker
I mean, think about Monet's Japanese garden.
00:37:16
Speaker
But to me as an American,
00:37:18
Speaker
This period is a real source of pride because for the first time, American crafts are stepping up to compete on the world stage.
00:37:27
Speaker
You know, not just Americans mastering European styles and techniques, as we've talked about with early American silver.
00:37:34
Speaker
But Americans leading the field, drawing on this rich intermingling of cultures to create enthralling new objects that even the stuffy art critics from Britain and France had no choice but to admire.
00:37:48
Speaker
So, you know, as I see it, the one company that really earned America's place on that world stage in this period, that was Tiffany and Company.
00:37:57
Speaker
Well, I think of the, and many listeners may think of it too, is the famous chrysanthemum designs of Tiffany.
00:38:03
Speaker
Is that an example of this here?
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:07
Speaker
So chrysanthemum comes about a little bit later and it is this incredible flourishing of, well, it has its roots certainly in what they would have described as oriental style or oriental design.
00:38:21
Speaker
But, you know, a chrysanthemum piece from Tiffany didn't look like a piece of Chinese or Japanese metalwork.
00:38:29
Speaker
It looked like a piece of Tiffany metalwork.
00:38:31
Speaker
So in looking at these world expositions, there was one particularly the Paris Exposition of 1878.
00:38:38
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about that one?
00:38:40
Speaker
Because it seems based on what I've read and you and I have chatted about, that was an important time.
00:38:46
Speaker
What happened then?
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:48
Speaker
So Tiffany at this time had a design director named Edward Seymour.
00:38:53
Speaker
And Moore had assembled this incredible collection of Asian art and decorative arts.
00:39:00
Speaker
And by the way, part of that collection actually came to him courtesy of Christopher Dresser, who had been hired by Tiffany and company to go to Japan and collect a bunch of things and bring them back.
00:39:12
Speaker
That whole collection, by the way, Moore bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
00:39:17
Speaker
And it's still there.
00:39:18
Speaker
It's a wonderful collection.
00:39:20
Speaker
And the curator there, Medill Harvey, has just published a book about it.
00:39:24
Speaker
We're looking forward, I hope, to an exhibition in the not too distant future.
00:39:27
Speaker
That is a fantastically interesting subject in itself.
00:39:31
Speaker
But, you know, Moore set out to create a new category of work for Tiffany.
00:39:37
Speaker
based around the inspiration that he was drawing from this collection, among other sources.
00:39:43
Speaker
This is the style that came to be known as Japanism or Japanesque.
00:39:47
Speaker
We're talking here about extremely visually distinctive objects.
00:39:52
Speaker
which are recognizable for a number of features.
00:39:55
Speaker
Probably the best known is the faceted surface that Tiffany gave to these pieces.
00:40:03
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:40:04
Speaker
Can you define that?
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:06
Speaker
So what that looks like is, it's funny because, you know, an English silversmith of the 18th century would have looked at a piece like this and thought, oh, you just didn't finish it.
00:40:15
Speaker
Because basically what they did was they hammered the surface with fairly large hammers without smoothing it out.
00:40:22
Speaker
So instead of having that perfectly smooth, round surface, you know, finished to a mirror shine, you had this own almost honeycomb-like but random and inconsistent pattern across the surface.
00:40:39
Speaker
And this particular technique was so popular it became, it was not only adopted by other firms like Gorham, but it actually became one of the chief indicators of arts and crafts metalwork for 30 years.
00:40:53
Speaker
You know, you see arts and crafts pieces in silver and copper and iron that all have this hand hammered finish, which by the way, they also described as martelay.
00:41:04
Speaker
But so in 1878, Tiffany has the opportunity to exhibit this new line of silverware at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
00:41:15
Speaker
And this is one of these world fairs, but it's not just one of these world's fairs.
00:41:20
Speaker
It's the world's fair.
00:41:22
Speaker
This is a huge, huge deal.
00:41:26
Speaker
If you were exhibiting at this fair...
00:41:28
Speaker
you would plan your booth for years in advance.
00:41:33
Speaker
And Tiffany certainly did that.
00:41:35
Speaker
And Edward C. Moore did that.
00:41:37
Speaker
So Tiffany craftsmen were working day and night for, I mean, I can only imagine the atmosphere in the workshop and the, I would like to think excitement, but maybe also dread.
00:41:51
Speaker
they were turning out objects that looked nothing like anything the world had ever seen.
00:41:56
Speaker
They had this hand-hammered finish, but they also had the incorporated themes from nature.
00:42:04
Speaker
They had many of the features that we think of as Art Nouveau, but keep in mind, this is a good 15 years before anything like Art Nouveau would be codified as an artistic movement.
00:42:17
Speaker
So you see leaves that are changing colors with a complexity of different metallic alloys, creating these wonderfully evocative color combinations.
00:42:28
Speaker
You see the decay of nature.
00:42:31
Speaker
It's not idealized.
00:42:32
Speaker
It's, you know, the leaves are rotting.
00:42:34
Speaker
You have beetles scampering over tree roots.
00:42:38
Speaker
You have gourds with bug-eaten holes in the sides of them.
00:42:42
Speaker
And
00:42:43
Speaker
All of this stuff that maybe sounds a little gross as I'm describing it, but when you look at the object, it's transformative and absolutely transfixing.
00:42:51
Speaker
And this was a total transformation in the world of silver.
00:42:55
Speaker
When the exhibition opened in Paris, the world stood up and paid attention.
00:43:00
Speaker
And that's what I'm talking about when I say that this was a moment of real American achievement.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yeah, they took home the prize, the major prize at the fair.
00:43:10
Speaker
This was an enormous coup for Tiffany, and the company would benefit from that for generations.
00:43:17
Speaker
One of the things that it seems like Tiffany really pioneered and certainly maybe some other companies did too, but it's this idea of the silver designer instead of this sort of standard designs coming out of companies.
00:43:31
Speaker
And John Curran was one name.
00:43:33
Speaker
You've mentioned some others.
00:43:35
Speaker
Can you talk about that?
00:43:36
Speaker
Because it seems like we're getting a little celebrity-ish here with some of these designers.
00:43:41
Speaker
And that was a new thing too.
00:43:43
Speaker
Am I correct about that?
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:43:45
Speaker
I mean, the whole idea of design is a bit of a novelty in this period.
00:43:50
Speaker
I mean, not that pieces of silver and furniture and other decorative arts hadn't been designed.
00:43:55
Speaker
Of course, they had been designed for as long as they had been made, since the days of cavemen.
00:44:00
Speaker
But to think of design as a separate category, as a separate occupation from making, that was relatively new in this period.
00:44:11
Speaker
You do see...
00:44:13
Speaker
people we would describe as designers at work in the 18th and certainly in the early 19th century.
00:44:19
Speaker
But what Tiffany was doing and what firms like Gorham would also do in their workshops was really separating the work between the craft and the design.
00:44:32
Speaker
We've talked about Edward Moore, who was a legendary design director for Tiffany.
00:44:38
Speaker
Pauling Farnham is another fairly famous name to come out of Tiffany & Company.
00:44:43
Speaker
The jewelry designer, John Curran, you just mentioned.
00:44:47
Speaker
These are people who were able to devote their time to just thinking about what they like to do with the medium.
00:44:55
Speaker
They weren't, you know, fulfilling the latest order.
00:44:58
Speaker
Well, sometimes they were.
00:44:59
Speaker
But generally speaking, they were charged with thinking about what is the image of this firm going to be?
00:45:05
Speaker
What kinds of pieces are we going to make?
00:45:08
Speaker
They were working really as artists.
00:45:10
Speaker
And maybe in reality, that's not too different from how a great 18th century silversmith was working.
00:45:17
Speaker
But certainly the way that the company was thinking about these people's roles had changed pretty dramatically.
00:45:22
Speaker
I'm really curious to ask you about the actual composition of silver.
00:45:28
Speaker
Now we're going to sound very technical for a couple of minutes, but the reason I bring it up, as you said a few minutes ago, you were talking about how companies would use silver and blend it with other metals to give a different quality to the silver, a different sheen, a different glint, as we say here in the Guild of Gentlemen.
00:45:44
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:45:45
Speaker
What was silver made of in general at the time?
00:45:47
Speaker
And where was it coming from?
00:45:49
Speaker
Here in the United States or elsewhere?
00:45:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:51
Speaker
So, you know, starting in the 14th century, the British government, as I discussed when we were talking about hallmarks, had a legal requirement for what they called the sterling standard, which is to say 92 and a half percent silver by weight.
00:46:08
Speaker
So as you warned your listeners, we are getting technical here.
00:46:12
Speaker
But when you talk about sterling silver, that's what you're talking about, 92.5%.
00:46:15
Speaker
Now, there are different standards that have been used at different times.
00:46:20
Speaker
So even England at a certain period in the early 18th century had a slightly higher standard called Britannia.
00:46:27
Speaker
Spanish coins were generally made to a lower standard, and that's important for American silver.
00:46:32
Speaker
Because in America, the silver that was being made here in the colonies and in the early republic was basically melted down from a random assortment of British silver and Spanish silver and other things.
00:46:46
Speaker
So the standard of silver that ended up being predominant in America is what we call coin silver.
00:46:52
Speaker
And that's closer to 90%.
00:46:54
Speaker
The rest of it, by the way, the other 7.5% or 10% is mostly copper with a few other elements thrown in there.
00:47:03
Speaker
It does make a difference in terms of how you work the silver because smaller copper content makes metal more malleable.
00:47:11
Speaker
One of the things Tiffany does in the mid-19th century is they officially adopt the sterling standard.
00:47:16
Speaker
At a time when most of the silver being made in America is what they called coin silver, Tiffany made a big hoopla about how they were selling sterling silver.
00:47:25
Speaker
That was very effective as a marketing ploy, and actually Gorham took them a while, but they eventually followed suit, and pretty soon all the other American manufacturers were also advertising sterling silver.
Prominent Patrons and Custom Silver
00:47:36
Speaker
Actually, toward the very end of the 19th century, Gorham starts making silver in an even higher standard, so some of the Martellay silver that we were talking about earlier gets up toward 96%.
00:47:49
Speaker
One interesting note here, we were talking about the Tiffany appearance at the 1878 exposition in Paris.
00:47:58
Speaker
One of the things that really astonished the world when they first saw these pieces in the Japanese style that Tiffany had brought to that show was that they weren't just silver, they actually incorporated other materials.
00:48:12
Speaker
And Tiffany referred to these pieces as silver and mixed metals.
00:48:15
Speaker
And they made these alloys that...
00:48:19
Speaker
Sometimes it was just, oh, we're going to change the ratio of silver and copper.
00:48:23
Speaker
Sometimes these metals were created in unusual ways.
00:48:28
Speaker
They were, you know, dyed with beet juice.
00:48:30
Speaker
They were artificially patinated, creating these really interesting colors that you wouldn't see on pieces made by other manufacturers or certainly made by silversmiths in England.
00:48:43
Speaker
And one of the reasons you didn't see it on pieces by silversmiths in England is that it was literally illegal for them to make pieces of silver that incorporated copper or other elements.
00:48:56
Speaker
And that again goes back to the regulation.
00:48:58
Speaker
The British government requires that pieces of silver be 92.5% silver by weight.
00:49:06
Speaker
Well, if you're taking sterling silver and then adding pieces of decorative copper to it, that piece is no longer sterling silver.
00:49:14
Speaker
So Tiffany had a huge competitive advantage in this new world of style.
00:49:19
Speaker
The English makers were literally legally prohibited, and by the way, still are today,
00:49:25
Speaker
from making pieces that incorporate these other decorative metals.
00:49:28
Speaker
We've also been talking about, you and I, some people that listeners may not be familiar with that are important in the story of 19th century silver.
00:49:37
Speaker
And two of them, one was Mary Jane Morgan, and the other was John William Mackey.
00:49:43
Speaker
These are people that were new to me.
00:49:45
Speaker
Can you talk about them and what their interesting stories were and how they fit into all of this?
00:49:50
Speaker
Well, Mary Jane Morgan is particularly interesting to silver collectors and dealers and scholars because she was Tiffany's great client for silver.
00:50:02
Speaker
And I say that it was only for a very short period of time because her husband died in the late 1870s.
00:50:08
Speaker
And so she got her wealth the old fashioned way.
00:50:11
Speaker
Nine million dollars from him, which she promptly put to use.
00:50:15
Speaker
Well, she was a client of many of the great New York manufacturers of the period.
00:50:19
Speaker
So, you know, herder brothers, etc.
00:50:22
Speaker
But at Tiffany and Company, she was the queen.
00:50:26
Speaker
They made so much silver for her, it's mind-boggling, and it was all to the most exacting standards.
00:50:33
Speaker
So when you get a piece of Tiffany Silver from the late 1870s or early 1880s, if it has a monogram, MJM, you don't need to know anything about that piece.
00:50:46
Speaker
You know it's great.
00:50:47
Speaker
Because Tiffany only made the very best for Mary Jane Morgan.
00:50:53
Speaker
and she appreciated it very much.
00:50:54
Speaker
Now, sadly, she died in 1885, so her collecting career was very short.
00:51:01
Speaker
And in the sale which followed her death, the gross sale of her silver was $1.2 million.
00:51:11
Speaker
Then.
00:51:12
Speaker
Then.
00:51:13
Speaker
I mean, that's just a mind-boggling figure.
00:51:17
Speaker
That would be an enormous figure today,
00:51:20
Speaker
And Ben, just where is Mary Jane Morgan's silver today?
00:51:25
Speaker
Well, I'm happy to say that it is widely dispersed such that you can see it in many different places around the country and around the world.
00:51:34
Speaker
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a great, great assortment of Tiffany pieces from the period, many of which came through Mary Jane Morgan.
00:51:43
Speaker
You can find pieces at other museums.
00:51:45
Speaker
A lot of it is on the private market.
00:51:47
Speaker
There was so much of it, frankly.
00:51:50
Speaker
I shouldn't say it's not rare because it is rare, but it's not as rare as it might be.
00:51:54
Speaker
And that's a good thing.
00:51:56
Speaker
So this is interesting because we were talking a few minutes ago about bespoke silver.
00:52:01
Speaker
And this is a whole different thing than just going into Tiffany's shop and deciding that you want to buy whatever's on offer.
00:52:07
Speaker
This is when you are in a certain economic situation and you decide to go to Tiffany and say, I want you to make me silver.
00:52:16
Speaker
And here are my thoughts about it.
00:52:18
Speaker
Right?
00:52:18
Speaker
This is where this all came from.
00:52:20
Speaker
And this is where some of the great fortunes actually really were great patrons of Tiffany.
00:52:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:52:26
Speaker
And the best example of that is John William Mackey.
00:52:30
Speaker
This is a man who his nickname was the Silver King.
00:52:36
Speaker
And the reason for that is he was one of the gentlemen who profited massively off the discovery of what's called the Comstock Lode, which is an enormous silver mine in Nevada.
00:52:49
Speaker
He was an Irishman, he was a prospector, he had worked day and night, month after month, got nowhere, poor as dirt, and one day lucked into this fortune.
00:53:01
Speaker
So overnight he is one of the richest men in America.
00:53:05
Speaker
And what good is that money if society won't accept you?
00:53:09
Speaker
He was nouveau riche, and his wife in particular was perturbed by this.
00:53:14
Speaker
You know, New York society didn't really want anything to do with her.
00:53:18
Speaker
So eventually she moved to Paris.
00:53:20
Speaker
But before she did, her husband decided to take her for a little trip.
00:53:25
Speaker
And they went down into the mine that was the source of their enormous fortune.
00:53:33
Speaker
And so his wife was walking through the mine shafts and looking around and seeing all these glittering jewels in the walls and the silver veins.
00:53:43
Speaker
And the story goes that she turned to her husband and said, Honey, will you have something made for us out of the silver from our mine?
00:53:56
Speaker
So Mackie got on the phone with Tiffany.
00:53:59
Speaker
I should say he probably got on the telegram with Tiffany.
00:54:02
Speaker
And he said to them, "'I am shipping you two tons of silver.'"
00:54:10
Speaker
And I want you to make me the greatest dinner service that you have ever made.
00:54:16
Speaker
And they did.
00:54:18
Speaker
And they set 200 workers to work on this over the course of two years.
00:54:24
Speaker
And they made a dinner service with 1,250 pieces.
00:54:28
Speaker
And you have to imagine this is not just flatware.
00:54:31
Speaker
This is everything.
00:54:32
Speaker
This is candelabra.
00:54:34
Speaker
This is centerpieces.
00:54:35
Speaker
This is...
00:54:36
Speaker
Oh, back to Mamie Fish, right?
00:54:38
Speaker
That sort of thing.
00:54:39
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes.
00:54:39
Speaker
The whole nine yards.
20th Century Silver Trends and Advice
00:54:41
Speaker
In fact, it was housed in nine enormous mahogany chests.
00:54:46
Speaker
And they transported it across the Atlantic to show at the 1878 exposition in Paris, where it was one of the most extravagant pieces on offer at the entire show.
00:54:57
Speaker
I can imagine.
00:54:58
Speaker
I should say not on offer.
00:55:01
Speaker
It was already owned by Mackey.
00:55:03
Speaker
But if you had the resources, and in this case, he literally had the resources, the physical silver.
00:55:10
Speaker
But if you had the money for it, Tiffany could do extraordinary things for you.
00:55:14
Speaker
And can we see bits of the Mackie silver today?
00:55:18
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:55:18
Speaker
Where is it?
00:55:19
Speaker
So again, like Mary Jane Morgan's collection, it's been fairly widely dispersed.
00:55:25
Speaker
It did pass down through various branches of the family, and some of it has been sold here and there.
00:55:32
Speaker
A few family members still have pieces of it.
00:55:35
Speaker
And I was talking with a gentleman not too long ago who actually still has one of the chests, which would be extraordinary to see.
00:55:43
Speaker
But a great deal of it has come on the private market.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah, our firm has sold several of those pieces to museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, where you can go and see some of it.
00:55:55
Speaker
And just to get you a little more excited about it, again, this is not just plain old silverware, right?
00:56:02
Speaker
The pieces that we recently sold to the Metropolitan Museum are these fantastically detailed gilt and enameled objects that they sort of boggle my mind as to how you could even make a piece like that.
00:56:18
Speaker
The fastidiousness of the craftsmanship is absolutely extraordinary.
00:56:23
Speaker
So Ben, as we cross the century point, and we really get into the early 1900s, sort of as we wind down our little tour here, can you talk a little bit about what was going on in the world of silver design as we sort of leave the Gilded Age and get a little bit into the 20th century?
00:56:40
Speaker
As we get into the 20th century, you know, the whole landscape of decorative arts starts to turn upside down once more.
00:56:47
Speaker
You know, on the one hand, you have the sort of continued influence of William Morris and John Ruskin and Charles Ashby and the arts and crafts movement.
00:56:57
Speaker
And these people are emphasizing the spiritual value of handmade objects.
00:57:02
Speaker
But on the other hand, now you start to get into movements like, you know, Wiener Werkstatt and Bauhaus and, you know, the influence of George Jensen from Copenhagen.
00:57:14
Speaker
And for all their differences, these movements share this idea of the pursuit of harmony between craft and industry.
00:57:23
Speaker
So really bringing these two concepts together and increasingly, you know, the sort of artisanal handcrafted silver that we associate with the early silversmiths, well, that was relegated to fine art circles.
00:57:37
Speaker
While, you know, the quotidian silver that's made for people's homes, even rich people's homes, that starts to come more out of mass production.
00:57:45
Speaker
So, you know, for the first time, this terminological difference between art and craft, which I'm putting in air quotes,
00:57:53
Speaker
That starts to rear its ugly head, though, you know, in truth, I think that's kind of a red herring.
00:57:57
Speaker
But, you know, as you get into the 19 teens and 20s, firms like Tiffany and Gorham, they're still making silver.
00:58:03
Speaker
Actually, they're still making a lot of silver.
00:58:06
Speaker
But increasingly, you're talking about assembly line types of pieces.
00:58:12
Speaker
Maybe they're hand finished, but they're largely machine made.
00:58:15
Speaker
They're stamped or they're cast.
00:58:18
Speaker
Now, Ben, I am sure by this point, I can just tell some of my listeners out there have left us and are digging around in their closets to find their great-grandmother's silver and sort of wondering about that.
00:58:32
Speaker
We've given them, I think, a few things to wonder about.
00:58:36
Speaker
So if someone really does have some vintage silver, and I'm just going to circle back to where we started at the beginning of the show, is what would you recommend somebody look for?
00:58:45
Speaker
Are there any particular things
00:58:47
Speaker
things one should be on the lookout for in looking at someone's family silver just to determine its value?
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:58:56
Speaker
I mean, for starters, if you can't figure out what you have, it can never hurt to snap some pictures and send them off to a dealer like me or an auction house.
00:59:04
Speaker
You know, 99% of what people show us is pretty uninspiring, but the other 1% can be really exciting and sometimes worth a lot of money.
00:59:13
Speaker
So, you know, most of us in the trade will tell you what we can about something just for free.
00:59:19
Speaker
So you might as well try.
00:59:21
Speaker
But if you want to investigate it on your own, which I recommend because it's a lot of fun, silver is kind of a special case with regards to antiques because there is actually a lot that you can often figure out on your own because of the marks that we've talked about.
00:59:37
Speaker
Most silver has some kind of mark on it, whether it's a hallmark or a maker's mark.
00:59:42
Speaker
And that can tell you a lot about who made it and around what time.
00:59:47
Speaker
It might even have, you know, a duty mark that tells you that it was imported to a country or from a country or it might have a company stamp.
00:59:55
Speaker
There are a lot of clues that you can look up on the Internet and find out about.
00:59:59
Speaker
And that's really worth the effort because you wouldn't believe the pieces that were, you know, on their way to be melted or, you know, sold at a junk shop, but that were rescued, you know, and turned out to be worth incredible sums of money.
01:00:14
Speaker
Or frankly, that just had some really gripping and inspiring stories to tell.
01:00:20
Speaker
So I guess the answer to all this is that you really just never know unless you look and ask some questions and do some research and you never know what you're going to find.
01:00:29
Speaker
Am I right about that?
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:30
Speaker
Well, and of course, the question of what it's worth on the market might be very different from the question of what it's worth to you personally.
01:00:37
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:00:39
Speaker
Now, before we go, I know listeners want to hear more from you, Ben.
01:00:43
Speaker
There's so much more we could certainly be talking about today.
01:00:47
Speaker
But can you talk a little bit about your own podcast, Curious Objects, and where listeners can find that and the kind of things that you talk about on your show?
01:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
01:00:59
Speaker
So Curious Objects is a podcast about, you guessed it, curious objects and the stories behind them.
01:01:05
Speaker
So we look at pieces from all periods, all origins, all types that have some kind of interest behind them.
01:01:15
Speaker
Now, recently, that's included pieces like a mysterious 19th century Louisiana family portrait of the children of a white family with a black child standing behind them.
01:01:28
Speaker
And what's the story behind that?
01:01:30
Speaker
Why was that black child included in that portrait?
01:01:33
Speaker
And why then was he erased from it?
01:01:36
Speaker
for over 100 years before it was rediscovered.
01:01:39
Speaker
There's actually a story in a recent episode about a piece of old New York silver.
01:01:43
Speaker
So if you're interested in colonial American silver from the 1730s and the path that that's charted through New York and South Carolina.
01:01:53
Speaker
Again, I think silver is a fantastic entry point into history of almost any period because it intertwines with every element of life.
01:02:02
Speaker
But every type of object has its own story to tell.
01:02:06
Speaker
And that's exactly what we're trying to do with curious
Closing Remarks and Credits
01:02:08
Speaker
objects.
01:02:08
Speaker
So you can find that on your favorite podcast app or at themagazineantiques.com.
01:02:14
Speaker
The Magazine Antiques publishes the podcast.
01:02:17
Speaker
I just love listening to Ben's show.
01:02:19
Speaker
And so I certainly encourage all my Gilded Gentleman listeners to listen to you as well.
01:02:25
Speaker
So, Ben, thank you so, so much for joining me today on the Gilded Gentleman.
01:02:30
Speaker
Thank you.
01:02:30
Speaker
It's been a pleasure.
01:02:31
Speaker
And a great thank you to the Magazine Antiques in whose association we created this episode today.
01:02:39
Speaker
And to my listeners, thank you for joining me for another episode of the Gilded Gentleman History Podcast.
01:02:45
Speaker
The Gilded Gentleman is produced by Bowery Boys Media, and this episode was edited and produced by Kieran Gannon.
01:02:52
Speaker
I invite you to join the show as a patron on patreon.com slash the Gilded Gentleman.
01:02:58
Speaker
Your support truly helps me in a very real way to manage the costs of research and writing and recording the show.
01:03:04
Speaker
I could not do it without you.
01:03:07
Speaker
And I'll see you soon.
01:03:09
Speaker
What's life without a little glint of gold?
01:03:13
Speaker
But for this week, only maybe a glint of silver.
01:03:24
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening, and thanks again to the Gilded Gentleman and Carl Raymond.
01:03:29
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
01:03:36
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
01:03:41
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.