Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
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.
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.
Speaker: Now, this is actually an episode from another podcast that you should be listening to if you aren't already.
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.
Speaker: Now, Carl invited me to join him on The Gilded Gentleman for an episode about Gilded Age Silver.
Speaker: I had a great time.
Speaker: I mean, of course I did.
Speaker: I love talking about silver.
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.
Speaker: And it's the first moment when America really takes its place on the world stage of decorative arts.
Speaker: So I'm thrilled to be able to share with you this episode of The Gilded Gentleman.
Speaker: As always, you can get in touch with me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: Make sure you're subscribed to Curious Objects so you'll get all of our new episodes.
Speaker: We've got some great ones coming up.
Speaker: And you can subscribe to The Guild of Gentlemen while you're at it.
Speaker: Without further ado, here's Carl Raymond.
Speaker: During America's Gilded Age, that last quarter of the 19th century, all that glittered, and there was plenty, wasn't always gold.
Speaker: Know my friends, it was sometimes silver.
Speaker: Silver was a precious and sumptuous extravagance and found its way not only into coinage, but elegant jewelry and accessories.
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.
Speaker: Just take spoons for example.
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.
Speaker: The 19th century in America changed the way silver was designed, how it looked, and how it was valued.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Speaker: So there.
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.
Speaker: No one except the butler and the esteemed Tiffany and company themselves, it seems, just knew how it all fit back together.
Speaker: This story makes two points.
Speaker: One, just how intricate and delicate some Gilded Age silver services really could be.
Speaker: And two, one of the surest ways to mess with a Gilded Age hostess's life was to mess with her silver.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: After leaving his native Tennessee, he earned his bachelor's degree at Yale.
Speaker: He is a specialist on antique silver and, as he himself says, anything old with a good story.
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.
Speaker: And we'll look a little bit more at that and talk about that at the end.
Speaker: Ben, I am so honored to have you join me on The Gilded Gentleman.
Speaker: Hey, thank you so much.
Speaker: You're too generous, but I've been really excited about this.
Speaker: Me too.
Speaker: We have so much to talk about.
Speaker: So just to really kick things off, Ben, I always love this question.
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?
Speaker: Because we should clear that up if we think there are any out there.
Speaker: Yeah, how long do you have, Carl?
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.
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.
Speaker: But actually, there's a much more interesting story that explains why that's not the case.
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.
Speaker: And we sort of use those terms goldsmith and silversmith interchangeably.
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.
Speaker: And so every piece of silver in England had to be marked by the hall to show that it had passed regulatory scrutiny.
Speaker: So that's where we first get the idea of the hallmark.
Speaker: It's not a maker's mark.
Speaker: It's not a scratch weight.
Speaker: It's not some other kind of mark.
Speaker: It's a mark made by the goldsmith's hall or by some comparable regulatory agency.
Speaker: So don't go getting excited about hallmarks on your silver when it actually might be a maker's mark.
Speaker: And which is more important, the maker's mark, from your perspective?
Speaker: That depends on the maker.
Speaker: As we will get into, right?
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.
Speaker: Can you dispel that myth a little bit, too, before we dive into the history here?
Speaker: Well, maybe it is worth something.
Speaker: I mean, maybe it's worth a lot.
Speaker: But let me put it this way.
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.
Speaker: You know, of course, there's the material value of the metal,
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.
Speaker: It needs to be interesting for some reason.
Speaker: Maybe it has a fantastic design.
Speaker: Maybe it was made by a particularly important maker.
Speaker: Maybe it's in particularly excellent condition.
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.
Speaker: So if it's rare and it's wonderful, then it might be worth a lot of money.
Speaker: But of course, for both of those factors to apply, it can't apply to every object.
Speaker: Otherwise, nothing would be valuable at all.
Speaker: So don't get too excited.
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.
Speaker: But even you were telling me that even sterling is not necessarily as valuable as some people think.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: I don't want to dispel people's excitement because there really are treasures out there to be found.
Speaker: And pieces have come to our firm through incredible channels that you would never have imagined.
Speaker: Pieces that were
Speaker: literally about to go into the melting pot that turned out to be wildly rare and important and valuable.
Speaker: So I don't want you to go throwing all your silver in the garbage can.
Speaker: You never know when something really is going to be, you know, antiques roadshow worthy.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I always like...
Speaker: to talk a little bit about what went on before any particular period.
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.
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?
Speaker: I certainly...
Speaker: And I'm sure many listeners think of Paul Revere, of course, and all the beautiful George II silver coming from England.
Speaker: But can you put all that in context, really?
Speaker: Where would a late 18th century American family have gotten their silver?
Speaker: So I do think that studying silver gives us a really powerful perspective.
Speaker: And a figure like Paul Revere is a great example of that.
Speaker: Today, we mostly know him as the midnight writer from the Longfellow poem.
Speaker: But, you know, even before the revolution, he was already a successful craftsman and businessman as a silversmith.
Speaker: I don't know if you've ever read that book, Johnny Tremaine.
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Yeah, I was 13 years old.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Book from the 1940s.
Speaker: But it's a great introduction to the role that silver was playing in the Boston economy and society of pre-revolutionary America.
Speaker: So, you know, Revere's shop in Boston produced an enormous amount of material of consistently high quality.
Speaker: And at that period, it's all based really heavily on designs and forms from England.
Speaker: The ties between Boston, New York and London are still very, very close.
Speaker: So, you know, English silversmiths are providing the basis for practically everything that American silversmiths are making in that period.
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.
Speaker: And in New York, of course, you particularly get the Dutch influence.
Speaker: So very early New York silver looks a lot like Dutch silver before it starts to look like English silver.
Speaker: And then English silver starts to look like French silver.
Speaker: And so American silver, which is trying to look like English silver, also starts to look like French silver.
Speaker: So there's this... Boy, that's confusing.
Speaker: Is that all what's happening at the end of the 18th century?
Speaker: Or have we crept into the 19th at this point?
Speaker: All happening through the 18th century, there is, you know, religious persecution is causing migrations and mixing of peoples and ideas and styles.
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.
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.
Speaker: You know, we're talking about the Boston Brahmins in Boston.
Speaker: They might have silver cutlery, silver candlesticks and beakers and goblets and tankards.
Speaker: They probably had silver baskets for bread and silver buttons and silver shoe buckles.
Speaker: But some of what they bought was imports, and those were mostly coming from London.
Speaker: And London had this enormous and ancient thriving silver industry.
Speaker: But keep in mind, just like clothing, just like furniture, fashions for silver changed very quickly over time.
Speaker: So, you know, you might have bought a teapot in 1740, but by 1755, it's out of fashion.
Speaker: And now you're kind of embarrassed half people over for tea.
Speaker: So what are you going to do?
Speaker: Well, you need to send that teapot in to the silversmith, have it melted down and turned into a new fashionable teapot.
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?
Speaker: You might have, and some people did.
Speaker: But the appeal of local shopping was pretty strong.
Speaker: And so a lot of what the silversmiths in New York and Boston and other American cities at this time were doing –
Speaker: was taking old objects, old mostly English pieces of silver and refashioning them to keep up with the times.
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.
Speaker: So they were still essentially copying English design at this point, right?
Speaker: A real American style of silver was still yet to emerge.
Speaker: Am I correct about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, in broad strokes, there were differences.
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.
Speaker: You know, some differences weren't so subtle, actually.
Speaker: American coffee pots tended to be much larger than English coffee pots, just to take an example.
Speaker: But the overall form, the profile of the pot, in most cases, was pretty similar to what was coming out of England.
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.
Speaker: Once we get into the 19th century a little bit, that some interesting things start to happen.
Speaker: So can you talk about that period and what was going on then?
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.
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.
Speaker: And in their place, you started to see these larger scale operations.
Speaker: People like Paul Revere had actually already started to move in that direction a generation or two earlier.
Speaker: But by the 1830s, the pace of that change is really, really quick.
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.
Speaker: If you can imagine doing that by hand with a hammer, yeah, it's incredibly demanding, laborious, time-consuming.
Speaker: Once you've got a rolling mill that can do that for you, it allows you to turn out so much more material.
Speaker: You've got fewer bespoke orders and more production lines.
Speaker: And a huge part of the story here is that the relative cost of labor versus material is
Speaker: was flipping upside down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I think we're going to talk later about the supply part of that equation.
Speaker: But you've got new mines and mining techniques that were bringing much more bullion to the market.
Speaker: So it became really important for a silversmith to reduce the amount of work that was actually needed to make these objects.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I saw a set of flatware, it was a museum piece that was done in the 1840s.
Speaker: And one of the big surprises was that it was silver plate, that it wasn't sterling silver.
Speaker: Can you talk about that?
Speaker: Because my understanding was that this was very desirable because this was a new technology at the time.
Speaker: So what was happening in the 1840s or so?
Speaker: And how did silver plates start?
Speaker: Yeah, so this is one of those great stories of accidental discovery.
Speaker: Back in the 1740s, there was a craftsman in Sheffield, England.
Speaker: His name was Thomas Bolziver, and a customer had brought a knife in to him to have it repaired.
Speaker: The knife handle was broken and the knife handle was made out of silver and he put it in a copper vise.
Speaker: Then he heated it up to try to repair the handle.
Speaker: But he heated it up a little too much, and the silver actually was just on the verge of melting.
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.
Speaker: He thought, oh, that's interesting.
Speaker: He started playing around, experimenting a bit.
Speaker: And after a while, he came across this, he developed this technique that
Speaker: for fusing together a very thin sheet of silver with a thicker sheet of copper.
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.
Speaker: So this became a wildly successful commercial enterprise.
Speaker: And by the 1780s and 90s, huge quantities of this stuff was being produced in Sheffield.
Speaker: And it became known as Old Sheffield Plate.
Speaker: It was an industrial process and it required specialized machinery.
Speaker: So you don't see much Old Sheffield Plate being made in America.
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.
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.
Speaker: sheet of silver over the top of even a very complex object.
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.
Speaker: So it sounds like what's really happening here is the industrialization of the silver manufacturing business, right?
Speaker: Like everything else at the time.
Speaker: Now, it really certainly seems to me like the greatest name in 19th century silver, of course, was Tiffany.
Speaker: So let's spend some time on Tiffany, shall we?
Speaker: Because some people may not realize that they were actually two Tiffany's.
Speaker: There was Charles Lewis Tiffany, and then there was Lewis Comfort Tiffany.
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?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And thanks for bringing that up, because it is a very common source of confusion.
Speaker: So Charles Tiffany was the founder of Tiffany and Company, and that's the company we know today.
Speaker: He started that firm back in 1837.
Speaker: And that company is specialized in silver and jewelry, as they still do today.
Speaker: Although, you know, of course, now their silver manufacturing looks very different from what it looked like in the 19th century.
Speaker: We'll get into that.
Speaker: Charles' son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, set off on his own and he had a special interest in stained glass and interior design.
Speaker: And, you know, ultimately it's his company, which he called Tiffany Studios, which makes the famous Tiffany lamps and such.
Speaker: You know, it's a bit complicated because Louis Comfort Tiffany actually did work for Tiffany and company for some time.
Speaker: But that's the basic idea, two separate companies with their own areas of specialty.
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.
Speaker: But, you know, it started out as a fairly ordinary New York City retailer.
Speaker: They didn't even make most of their own silver.
Speaker: They hired other silversmiths to make pieces that they then sold out of their shop.
Speaker: But by the 1870s, they had 500 people working in their manufacturing downtown in Manhattan.
Speaker: So how did Charles think about silver?
Speaker: It seems like in many ways he created a revolution in silver.
Speaker: Was it simply from a design point of view?
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.
Speaker: So there was an opportunity to create many more pieces than certainly there had been in earlier years.
Speaker: But what was his revolution in silver?
Speaker: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker: I mean, what you see over the course of the 1830s, 40s, 50s is America coming into its own economically.
Speaker: And what that meant was a huge increase in the quantity of silver that was being produced and used in this country.
Speaker: You know, this was a country that was coming out of a great bullion shortage.
Speaker: That was one of the causes of the American Revolution was the lack of currency, physical currency that was available for use.
Speaker: But by the middle of the 19th century, again, things were turning a bit upside down economically.
Speaker: You started to have much more.
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.
Speaker: Now, we're going to come back to Tiffany in just a few minutes, but what about some other manufacturers at the time?
Speaker: Can you talk about, for example, Gorham came on the market and there were some others.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: You had firms trying to do really ambitious silversmithing work all up and down the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts down to Baltimore.
Speaker: And some of these firms became household names.
Speaker: You have Whiting and Company.
Speaker: You have Samuel Kirk.
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.
Speaker: And once again, like Tiffany, you know, they started as a small shop in Newport, Rhode Island, primarily selling spoons.
Speaker: But it was in 1848 that Jabez Gorham had founded the firm.
Speaker: He stepped down, sold the company to his son, and John, his son, had great ambitions for the firm.
Speaker: Right away, they started to expand rapidly.
Speaker: They moved away from the traditions of small-scale craftsmen and the apprenticeship model.
Speaker: They started to manufacture a wide variety of products, hollowware.
Speaker: You know, it wasn't just spoons anymore.
Speaker: And they were using steam power.
Speaker: They were one of the first silversmithing outfits to adopt steam power in their production and other methods of automation and industrialization.
Speaker: And right away, you know, Gorham was also starting to think more ambitiously about design.
Speaker: They didn't just want to be selling objects.
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.
Speaker: So they hired a design director.
Speaker: They staffed a design department.
Speaker: And by the time of the Civil War, Gorham was widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with.
Speaker: Their silver could be found in the Lincoln White House.
Speaker: And their fortunes only rose from there.
Speaker: Were they rising above Tiffany?
Speaker: I mean, who was winning this game?
Speaker: That depends on who you ask.
Speaker: If you ask me, it was Tiffany.
Speaker: Gorham did produce some truly remarkable objects.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker: Can you define that?
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.
Speaker: It essentially is used to mean hand hammered.
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.
Speaker: So they're often incredibly ornate.
Speaker: They're full of swirls.
Speaker: They're full of facets.
Speaker: They are difficult to look at without imagining the silversmith's hammer making its blows across the surface.
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.
Speaker: But they found it was a very successful marketing term, which is evidenced by the fact that people still talk about it today.
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.
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?
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.
Speaker: This is another area where, after looking at thousands of objects, you start to develop a bit of an intuition for it.
Speaker: As a rule of thumb, Gorham did a lot more work in copper.
Speaker: They also, they didn't just work in copper and silver either.
Speaker: They were famous for producing large scale bronzes.
Speaker: So they had really taken on metalworking at every scale and in every context.
Speaker: But Tiffany would incorporate other metals into their work, copper and gold and their own proprietary alloys.
Speaker: Gorham really featured some of those secondary metals in a way that it's rare to find in Tiffany objects.
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.
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.
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Speaker: to find an appraiser in the right location and with the right knowledge for you.
Speaker: And check out their online and in-person courses and conferences with upcoming subjects including Japanese prints, indigenous art, and gems and jewelry.
Speaker: You can even take their course in appraisal studies or their specialty courses for an easy way to turn your connoisseurship into a career.
Speaker: Again, that's isa-appraisers.org.
Speaker: And we're back.
Speaker: I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast.
Speaker: And today we are taking a look at silver, not only in the Gilded Age, but throughout the 19th century in America.
Speaker: And I'm joined by silver expert and host of the Curious Objects podcast, Ben Miller.
Speaker: So I'd like to jump ahead a little bit, really, to the very beginnings of the Gilded Age.
Speaker: We've talked a little bit around this, but I want to really dive in here.
Speaker: So we're talking about the late 1870s.
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.
Speaker: So can you talk about, first of all,
Speaker: these world expositions in general, and really share with listeners what they were, and most importantly, how important they were.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: So there's a lot of variation, but the core idea was pretty consistent.
Speaker: And that was these were commercial enterprises with patriotic flavor.
Speaker: So the idea was to showcase great achievements in technology and industry and craft and art.
Speaker: And for a designer or manufacturer, this was an unparalleled opportunity to show off your talents and innovations.
Speaker: Huge, huge numbers of people attended these fairs.
Speaker: And of course, many of the attendees were extremely influential figures in the world of art criticism.
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.
Speaker: I mean, what I find fascinating about it, this was the 19th century version of the greatest marketing machine ever built, right?
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.
Speaker: Am I right about that?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, these were such exciting events.
Speaker: They were planned for years.
Speaker: Entire campuses were built to host them.
Speaker: You had...
Speaker: thousands and thousands of exhibitors, yeah, nobody wanted to miss the World's Fair.
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.
Speaker: Can you talk about that?
Speaker: Because that fits into this right at this point in history, too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, as you can tell by walking through the British Museum, the European fascination with the exotic is nothing remotely new.
Speaker: And, you know, it wasn't just taking things from far off lands and bringing them home.
Speaker: It was also taking materials and inspiration.
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.
Speaker: But
Speaker: You know, in the late 19th century, that interest really exploded and it was a reflection of rapidly expanding global trade.
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.
Speaker: You know, they were reaping tremendous rewards from their increasing participation in the global economy.
Speaker: So there was this great proliferation of the exchange of materials, techniques, styles, designs, and you see that influence even in French art.
Speaker: I mean, think about Monet's Japanese garden.
Speaker: But to me as an American,
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.
Speaker: You know, not just Americans mastering European styles and techniques, as we've talked about with early American silver.
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.
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.
Speaker: Well, I think of the, and many listeners may think of it too, is the famous chrysanthemum designs of Tiffany.
Speaker: Is that an example of this here?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: But, you know, a chrysanthemum piece from Tiffany didn't look like a piece of Chinese or Japanese metalwork.
Speaker: It looked like a piece of Tiffany metalwork.
Speaker: So in looking at these world expositions, there was one particularly the Paris Exposition of 1878.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that one?
Speaker: Because it seems based on what I've read and you and I have chatted about, that was an important time.
Speaker: What happened then?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Tiffany at this time had a design director named Edward Seymour.
Speaker: And Moore had assembled this incredible collection of Asian art and decorative arts.
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.
Speaker: That whole collection, by the way, Moore bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker: And it's still there.
Speaker: It's a wonderful collection.
Speaker: And the curator there, Medill Harvey, has just published a book about it.
Speaker: We're looking forward, I hope, to an exhibition in the not too distant future.
Speaker: That is a fantastically interesting subject in itself.
Speaker: But, you know, Moore set out to create a new category of work for Tiffany.
Speaker: based around the inspiration that he was drawing from this collection, among other sources.
Speaker: This is the style that came to be known as Japanism or Japanesque.
Speaker: We're talking here about extremely visually distinctive objects.
Speaker: which are recognizable for a number of features.
Speaker: Probably the best known is the faceted surface that Tiffany gave to these pieces.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: Can you define that?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Because basically what they did was they hammered the surface with fairly large hammers without smoothing it out.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: But so in 1878, Tiffany has the opportunity to exhibit this new line of silverware at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
Speaker: And this is one of these world fairs, but it's not just one of these world's fairs.
Speaker: It's the world's fair.
Speaker: This is a huge, huge deal.
Speaker: If you were exhibiting at this fair...
Speaker: you would plan your booth for years in advance.
Speaker: And Tiffany certainly did that.
Speaker: And Edward C. Moore did that.
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.
Speaker: they were turning out objects that looked nothing like anything the world had ever seen.
Speaker: They had this hand-hammered finish, but they also had the incorporated themes from nature.
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.
Speaker: So you see leaves that are changing colors with a complexity of different metallic alloys, creating these wonderfully evocative color combinations.
Speaker: You see the decay of nature.
Speaker: It's not idealized.
Speaker: It's, you know, the leaves are rotting.
Speaker: You have beetles scampering over tree roots.
Speaker: You have gourds with bug-eaten holes in the sides of them.
Speaker: And
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.
Speaker: And this was a total transformation in the world of silver.
Speaker: When the exhibition opened in Paris, the world stood up and paid attention.
Speaker: And that's what I'm talking about when I say that this was a moment of real American achievement.
Speaker: Yeah, they took home the prize, the major prize at the fair.
Speaker: This was an enormous coup for Tiffany, and the company would benefit from that for generations.
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.
Speaker: And John Curran was one name.
Speaker: You've mentioned some others.
Speaker: Can you talk about that?
Speaker: Because it seems like we're getting a little celebrity-ish here with some of these designers.
Speaker: And that was a new thing too.
Speaker: Am I correct about that?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, the whole idea of design is a bit of a novelty in this period.
Speaker: I mean, not that pieces of silver and furniture and other decorative arts hadn't been designed.
Speaker: Of course, they had been designed for as long as they had been made, since the days of cavemen.
Speaker: But to think of design as a separate category, as a separate occupation from making, that was relatively new in this period.
Speaker: You do see...
Speaker: people we would describe as designers at work in the 18th and certainly in the early 19th century.
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.
Speaker: We've talked about Edward Moore, who was a legendary design director for Tiffany.
Speaker: Pauling Farnham is another fairly famous name to come out of Tiffany & Company.
Speaker: The jewelry designer, John Curran, you just mentioned.
Speaker: These are people who were able to devote their time to just thinking about what they like to do with the medium.
Speaker: They weren't, you know, fulfilling the latest order.
Speaker: Well, sometimes they were.
Speaker: But generally speaking, they were charged with thinking about what is the image of this firm going to be?
Speaker: What kinds of pieces are we going to make?
Speaker: They were working really as artists.
Speaker: And maybe in reality, that's not too different from how a great 18th century silversmith was working.
Speaker: But certainly the way that the company was thinking about these people's roles had changed pretty dramatically.
Speaker: I'm really curious to ask you about the actual composition of silver.
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.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker: What was silver made of in general at the time?
Speaker: And where was it coming from?
Speaker: Here in the United States or elsewhere?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: So as you warned your listeners, we are getting technical here.
Speaker: But when you talk about sterling silver, that's what you're talking about, 92.5%.
Speaker: Now, there are different standards that have been used at different times.
Speaker: So even England at a certain period in the early 18th century had a slightly higher standard called Britannia.
Speaker: Spanish coins were generally made to a lower standard, and that's important for American silver.
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.
Speaker: So the standard of silver that ended up being predominant in America is what we call coin silver.
Speaker: And that's closer to 90%.
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.
Speaker: It does make a difference in terms of how you work the silver because smaller copper content makes metal more malleable.
Speaker: One of the things Tiffany does in the mid-19th century is they officially adopt the sterling standard.
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.
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.
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%.
Speaker: One interesting note here, we were talking about the Tiffany appearance at the 1878 exposition in Paris.
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.
Speaker: And Tiffany referred to these pieces as silver and mixed metals.
Speaker: And they made these alloys that...
Speaker: Sometimes it was just, oh, we're going to change the ratio of silver and copper.
Speaker: Sometimes these metals were created in unusual ways.
Speaker: They were, you know, dyed with beet juice.
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.
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.
Speaker: And that again goes back to the regulation.
Speaker: The British government requires that pieces of silver be 92.5% silver by weight.
Speaker: Well, if you're taking sterling silver and then adding pieces of decorative copper to it, that piece is no longer sterling silver.
Speaker: So Tiffany had a huge competitive advantage in this new world of style.
Speaker: The English makers were literally legally prohibited, and by the way, still are today,
Speaker: from making pieces that incorporate these other decorative metals.
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.
Speaker: And two of them, one was Mary Jane Morgan, and the other was John William Mackey.
Speaker: These are people that were new to me.
Speaker: Can you talk about them and what their interesting stories were and how they fit into all of this?
Speaker: Well, Mary Jane Morgan is particularly interesting to silver collectors and dealers and scholars because she was Tiffany's great client for silver.
Speaker: And I say that it was only for a very short period of time because her husband died in the late 1870s.
Speaker: And so she got her wealth the old fashioned way.
Speaker: Nine million dollars from him, which she promptly put to use.
Speaker: Well, she was a client of many of the great New York manufacturers of the period.
Speaker: So, you know, herder brothers, etc.
Speaker: But at Tiffany and Company, she was the queen.
Speaker: They made so much silver for her, it's mind-boggling, and it was all to the most exacting standards.
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.
Speaker: You know it's great.
Speaker: Because Tiffany only made the very best for Mary Jane Morgan.
Speaker: and she appreciated it very much.
Speaker: Now, sadly, she died in 1885, so her collecting career was very short.
Speaker: And in the sale which followed her death, the gross sale of her silver was $1.2 million.
Speaker: Then.
Speaker: Then.
Speaker: I mean, that's just a mind-boggling figure.
Speaker: That would be an enormous figure today,
Speaker: And Ben, just where is Mary Jane Morgan's silver today?
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.
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.
Speaker: You can find pieces at other museums.
Speaker: A lot of it is on the private market.
Speaker: There was so much of it, frankly.
Speaker: I shouldn't say it's not rare because it is rare, but it's not as rare as it might be.
Speaker: And that's a good thing.
Speaker: So this is interesting because we were talking a few minutes ago about bespoke silver.
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.
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.
Speaker: And here are my thoughts about it.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: This is where this all came from.
Speaker: And this is where some of the great fortunes actually really were great patrons of Tiffany.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And the best example of that is John William Mackey.
Speaker: This is a man who his nickname was the Silver King.
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.
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.
Speaker: So overnight he is one of the richest men in America.
Speaker: And what good is that money if society won't accept you?
Speaker: He was nouveau riche, and his wife in particular was perturbed by this.
Speaker: You know, New York society didn't really want anything to do with her.
Speaker: So eventually she moved to Paris.
Speaker: But before she did, her husband decided to take her for a little trip.
Speaker: And they went down into the mine that was the source of their enormous fortune.
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.
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?
Speaker: So Mackie got on the phone with Tiffany.
Speaker: I should say he probably got on the telegram with Tiffany.
Speaker: And he said to them, "'I am shipping you two tons of silver.'"
Speaker: And I want you to make me the greatest dinner service that you have ever made.
Speaker: And they did.
Speaker: And they set 200 workers to work on this over the course of two years.
Speaker: And they made a dinner service with 1,250 pieces.
Speaker: And you have to imagine this is not just flatware.
Speaker: This is everything.
Speaker: This is candelabra.
Speaker: This is centerpieces.
Speaker: This is...
Speaker: Oh, back to Mamie Fish, right?
Speaker: That sort of thing.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker: The whole nine yards.
Speaker: In fact, it was housed in nine enormous mahogany chests.
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.
Speaker: I can imagine.
Speaker: I should say not on offer.
Speaker: It was already owned by Mackey.
Speaker: But if you had the resources, and in this case, he literally had the resources, the physical silver.
Speaker: But if you had the money for it, Tiffany could do extraordinary things for you.
Speaker: And can we see bits of the Mackie silver today?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Where is it?
Speaker: So again, like Mary Jane Morgan's collection, it's been fairly widely dispersed.
Speaker: It did pass down through various branches of the family, and some of it has been sold here and there.
Speaker: A few family members still have pieces of it.
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.
Speaker: But a great deal of it has come on the private market.
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.
Speaker: And just to get you a little more excited about it, again, this is not just plain old silverware, right?
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.
Speaker: The fastidiousness of the craftsmanship is absolutely extraordinary.
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?
Speaker: As we get into the 20th century, you know, the whole landscape of decorative arts starts to turn upside down once more.
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.
Speaker: And these people are emphasizing the spiritual value of handmade objects.
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.
Speaker: And for all their differences, these movements share this idea of the pursuit of harmony between craft and industry.
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.
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.
Speaker: So, you know, for the first time, this terminological difference between art and craft, which I'm putting in air quotes,
Speaker: That starts to rear its ugly head, though, you know, in truth, I think that's kind of a red herring.
Speaker: But, you know, as you get into the 19 teens and 20s, firms like Tiffany and Gorham, they're still making silver.
Speaker: Actually, they're still making a lot of silver.
Speaker: But increasingly, you're talking about assembly line types of pieces.
Speaker: Maybe they're hand finished, but they're largely machine made.
Speaker: They're stamped or they're cast.
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.
Speaker: We've given them, I think, a few things to wonder about.
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?
Speaker: Are there any particular things
Speaker: things one should be on the lookout for in looking at someone's family silver just to determine its value?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
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.
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.
Speaker: So, you know, most of us in the trade will tell you what we can about something just for free.
Speaker: So you might as well try.
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.
Speaker: Most silver has some kind of mark on it, whether it's a hallmark or a maker's mark.
Speaker: And that can tell you a lot about who made it and around what time.
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.
Speaker: There are a lot of clues that you can look up on the Internet and find out about.
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.
Speaker: Or frankly, that just had some really gripping and inspiring stories to tell.
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.
Speaker: Am I right about that?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Now, before we go, I know listeners want to hear more from you, Ben.
Speaker: There's so much more we could certainly be talking about today.
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?
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker: So Curious Objects is a podcast about, you guessed it, curious objects and the stories behind them.
Speaker: So we look at pieces from all periods, all origins, all types that have some kind of interest behind them.
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.
Speaker: And what's the story behind that?
Speaker: Why was that black child included in that portrait?
Speaker: And why then was he erased from it?
Speaker: for over 100 years before it was rediscovered.
Speaker: There's actually a story in a recent episode about a piece of old New York silver.
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.
Speaker: Again, I think silver is a fantastic entry point into history of almost any period because it intertwines with every element of life.
Speaker: But every type of object has its own story to tell.
Speaker: And that's exactly what we're trying to do with curious objects.
Speaker: So you can find that on your favorite podcast app or at themagazineantiques.com.
Speaker: The Magazine Antiques publishes the podcast.
Speaker: I just love listening to Ben's show.
Speaker: And so I certainly encourage all my Gilded Gentleman listeners to listen to you as well.
Speaker: So, Ben, thank you so, so much for joining me today on the Gilded Gentleman.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker: And a great thank you to the Magazine Antiques in whose association we created this episode today.
Speaker: And to my listeners, thank you for joining me for another episode of the Gilded Gentleman History Podcast.
Speaker: The Gilded Gentleman is produced by Bowery Boys Media, and this episode was edited and produced by Kieran Gannon.
Speaker: I invite you to join the show as a patron on patreon.com slash the Gilded Gentleman.
Speaker: Your support truly helps me in a very real way to manage the costs of research and writing and recording the show.
Speaker: I could not do it without you.
Speaker: And I'll see you soon.
Speaker: What's life without a little glint of gold?
Speaker: But for this week, only maybe a glint of silver.
Speaker: Thanks so much for listening, and thanks again to the Gilded Gentleman and Carl Raymond.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
