An American Heritage Cast in Silver

“We really wish Myer Myers had taken that famous ride of Paul Revere,” says Skirball Cultural Center’s senior curator for Judaica and Americana, Grace Cohen Grossman.

If he had, one of the finest silversmiths and one of the few prominent Jewish figures of the late-Colonial American era might have something of the name recognition of his more famous and more prolific Boston counterpart.

Instead, Myers and his life in 18th century New York are relatively forgotten--even though a collector paid upward of $100,000 at auction for a coffeepot that David L. Barquist, the leading expert on Myers and associate curator of American decorative arts at Yale University Art Gallery, says “was not even one of his greatest objects.”

“Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York,” which opens today at the Skirball, should alleviate Myers’ posthumous anonymity. It is meant to highlight what Barquist calls “some of the finest American silver in the Rococo style” produced during the two decades leading up to the American Revolution. The exhibition, which Barquist originated at Yale, is the first to focus on Myers since 1954, when the Brooklyn Museum celebrated the tricentennial of the arrival of Jews in New York.

Assembled from Yale’s silver collection and nearly 60 other lenders, it showcases Myers’ punch ladles and Torah finials, milk pots and snuff boxes, from unadorned early designs to elaborately chased and engraved styles at the peak of his workshop’s prominence. The show also highlights the work of his competitors, portraits of his clients, and maps, letters and other records that open a window on Colonial society and the earliest Jewish congregation in North America.

Myer Myers was born in New York in 1723 to a Jewish shopkeeper. He grew up in a city that was teeming with so many ethnic and religious groups--French Huguenots, English Quakers, Africans (mostly slaves), Dutch Reformed city founders and more--that there was no clear majority. Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews were one of the smallest groups, accounting for only 1% of the city’s population. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Jews, who had known prejudice and expulsion in Europe, experienced the freedom of relative anonymity. In fact, as Jonathan D. Sarna points out in his catalog essay, “On the eve of the American Revolution, Judaism remained all but invisible to most colonists. No more than one American in a thousand was Jewish, only five cities had significant Jewish populations, and only New York and Newport boasted synagogue buildings.”

After completing a seven-year apprenticeship, Myers became not only the first Jewish silversmith in New York, but also, according to Barquist, the first native Jew in the British empire to open up a silver business.

“Throughout Western Europe, Jews were excluded from trade guilds,” Grossman explains. The gold and silver trade was particularly off-limits, “to keep precious metals out of the hands of Jews.”

Myers’ career in the Colonies could have happened only in New York, and not just because of the city’s ethnic mix.

Compared with their fellow Colonists in Puritan New England, “patrons in New York were wealthier and more concerned with keeping up to date with English fashion,” Barquist says. “New England silver was simple and sturdy. The taste in New York was opulent, showy.”

Myers’ client base included a who’s who of New York. One of his most important patrons was the Livingston family, whose immense land grant was said to have had no western boundary and included all of what today is Duchess and Columbia counties. Another patron was the Rev. Samuel Johnson, founder of the Anglican Church in Connecticut and founding president of King’s College, now Columbia University.

Some of Myers’ most exquisite and original pieces were commissioned by Susannah and Samuel Cornell, Loyalists who celebrated their self-made wealth and promoted his political ambitions by stocking their home with self-aggrandizing luxury. One of their commissions, a pierced dish ring (used to hold hot dishes off a table top), is among the exhibition’s most singular objects.

“There is nothing else in American silver equal to this,” Barquist says. Myers took the unusual measure of placing his surname not once, but twice, to the right and left, of his patrons’ engraved initials on the front of the piece. “Placing the maker’s stamp next to the monogram shows how self-confident Myers was,” Barquist continues. “He was at his peak in the 1770s. This was his very best work.”

Such silver pieces tell as many stories about their owners as their maker. Life expectancy was short and remarriages common in the 18th century, and as families grew and intermarried, many of their allegiances could be traced through their silver. For example, it was not unusual for a married woman, such as the prominent Dorothea Remsen, to engrave her silver with her maiden initials, “so you would know whose money paid for what,” Barquist says. It was also not uncommon to find the underside engraved with a notation of who should inherit what.

“In the 18th century they were obsessed with inheritances,” Barquist says. “Nine times out of 10, it was the women who inherited the silver. The men inherited all the good stuff like land and livestock.”

Although often quite beautiful, originality of design was rarely the point with these goods, and the exhibition includes English silver, such as a cruet set with crystal flasks, chased and pierced silver caps and an escutcheon for a coat of arms, that may have served as a model for some of Myers’ work. Daniel Christian Fueter, an immigrant Swiss silversmith with whom Myers shared clients, appears to have influenced his work, and vice versa. Fueter came to New York via London in 1754, bringing with him the latest in English styles. His marked work is represented by a number of objects in the show, including a gold and coral teether/rattle produced for a very special baby.

Myers, like many of his clients, helped establish himself by marrying well. His first wife, Elkaleh Myers Cohen, provided capital to outfit a workshop that could turn out luxury items. “You couldn’t make a living making these things,” Barquist says. “These were loss leaders, there was too much labor involved. Most silversmiths never got beyond the bread-and-butter phase of making flatware, porringers and canns [Colonial mugs].”

In a relationship akin to that of couture and ready-to-wear, Myers also underwrote his high end goods by having apprentices and employees turn out standardized objects such as milk pots and teaspoons for retail sale to a less affluent clientele. (There were no forks as we know them in the 18th century.) For a period of several years, Myers even entered into New York City’s first formal partnership with another silversmith, Benjamin Halsted, to increase his market share. In all, 380 objects survive with Myers’ marks on them; that number leads Barquist to believe that Myers ran the largest New York silver workshop in the pre-Revolutionary period.

Like his father, Myers was also a leader of New York’s Shearith Israel, founded in 1654, and referred to by Sarna as “the mother congregation” of America’s synagogues. This brought Myers into a strong network of Jewish families not just in New York, but also in the growing cities of Philadelphia and Newport, as well as smaller Colonial enclaves in Savannah and Charleston. Although most of the work Myers did for his Jewish clients was dramatically less opulent than that for his Christian clients, his elaborate Torah finials, the decorations that crown a synagogue’s Torah scrolls, were among his most exquisite work.

“These are spectacular objects, big flashy and beautiful,” Grossman says. “We are incredibly fortunate to have four [of the five] surviving Colonial American torah finials in the exhibition.” All five sets were made by Myers and all are still in use.

Myers’ finials reflect the English Rococo style of the times, but their basic shapes also hold with established Jewish traditions. Called rimonim, the Hebrew word for pomegranates, they take their bulbous midsections and crowns from the shape of the fruit. Eaten on Rosh Hashana, the pomegranate was believed to hold 613 seeds, one for each commandment or mitzvah in the Torah.

Each finial is also adorned with several tiers of gold-plated bells, referring to a passage in Exodus that describes pomegranate applique and bells edging the high priest’s robes. The bells assured that the congregants could hear him as he entered the holy of holies. When the Torah is paraded through the congregation, the bells tinkle in what Grossman refers to as “one of the highlights of the Saturday-morning Sabbath service.”

Myers’ productivity and prosperity came to a close with the American Revolution. Although an active supporter of independence, at 53, Myers was too old to fight, and in the summer of 1776, he moved with his second wife, Joyce Mears, and six dependent children from British-occupied New York to Norwalk, Conn., a town he mistakenly thought would provide a safe haven too sleepy for the British to bother with. But the port was attacked from the Long Island Sound and burned to the ground.

Having lost his home, studio and many of his tools, Myers moved farther east to Stratford, Conn., where he struggled for four years to reestablish his business. Within days of hearing of George Washington’s victorious claim to New York at the war’s end, in late November of 1783, Myers returned to start life anew in his hometown.

By then too much had changed. There were new production techniques, younger artisans, an economic depression and changing fashions to contend with. The Rococo style that had been Myers’ specialty was replaced with the clean lines of Neoclassicism. Although Myers executed exquisite pieces in this vein, he was never able to return to the level of patronage he’d had before the war.

The totality of Myers’ work provides an object lesson in the many ways to work a piece of metal--including piercing, chasing, engraving, casting and soldering--and the exhibition makes a point of depicting the dangerous and difficult transformation of silver from raw material to beautiful object. (There will even be a hands-on workshop for those interested in trying out the techniques.) All of which helps explain why one of his associates describes Myer Myers as “that noted and proficient mechanic.”

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“Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. Dates: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 12-5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. closed Monday. Ends May 26. Admission: $8 general; $6, students and seniors; free, children under 12. Phone: (310) 440-4500; www.skirball.org.

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Susan Emerling is an occasional contributor to Calendar.