Silver Linings
For anyone who thinks American silver design is just a 1770s bowl by Paul Revere, “Magnificent Tiffany Silver,” the latest book by Tiffany design director John Loring (Harry N. Abrams, 2001) is an eye-opener.
“It’s nice to show that the most interesting things being done in silver in the 1870s and on were being done here, not in Europe. Many people still tend to think that silver design began and ended with George III silver in England,” says Loring. “But there was a real American style that looked West and used images from the American Indian and Japan.”
To be sure, this book is solely about Tiffany, and one cannot forget the author’s investment in the products, but the stories Loring tells nevertheless figure prominently in the history of the medium.
Among those responsible for breaking with Europe and creating an American style is Tiffany designer Edward C. Moore (1827-91), who is celebrated with more than 50 pages in this picture-filled 272-page book.
Moore won the bronze medal at the 1867 Paris Exposition, a competitive decorative arts show, for his “Moresque” tea set, the first award ever given American silver by a foreign jury. And this was only two years after the Civil War ended. “These were really modern times,” says Loring. “Manet was painting impressionist paintings, Japan had been open for 10 years and the influence of Oriental art had completely changed the look of the world.” And it was the Americans who developed a more modern, abstracted look for design.
The 1867 exposition’s theme was Orientalism, which reinforced Moore’s interest in both Islamic and Japanese images. And this interest continued, so that in 1871 Moore designed “Japanese” silver flatware (renamed “Audubon” during World War II), which remains Tiffany’s best-selling silver pattern today.
At the 1878 Paris Exposition, Tiffany & Co. with designs by Moore, won the grand prize “for its entirely revolutionary introduction of designs liberated from Western Europe’s rigid and overused design vocabularies and based on the superbly refined, organic and naturalistic design aesthetic of Japan,” writes Loring. In fact, Loring calls Moore’s Japanesque silverware America’s greatest achievement in silver. “It was looked on as being completely modern and innovative and in step with the times. The Europeans were amazed because it was the Americans who had done this, the ones who were supposed to have no culture, no civilization, no ideas, no design,” he said in an interview.
There is a hammered-silver flask with a fish swimming through reeds, a Japanesque vase with a copper body covered with pale gray enamel and applied silver, copper and brass decoration, and silver and copper coffee sets with dragonflies and wisterias, all motifs that Louis Comfort Tiffany would use later in his Art Nouveau designs.
The 1889 Saracenic wares were the final flowering of Moore’s genius as a silversmith, writes Loring. In them he compiled all that he loved in Islamic art.
Chapters after the one devoted to Moore feature other Tiffany silversmiths and their contributions to the evolution of silver design. Loring writes, “Although not attaining the same level of invention, vigor and originality in their designs and silver crafting as Moore, John T. Curran and Paulding Farnham, along with Moore’s original collaborators James Whitehouse, Charles Grosjean, Eugene Soligny and Charles Osborne, made undeniably major contributions to the history of 19th century silver at Tiffany’s and in America.”
Examples of various styles include American Victorianism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau and contemporary. Under Victorianism, there is the sculptural 1873 Comanche Trophy with an Indian hunter on his galloping horse, and a wine jug in the form of a pig being annoyed by a large dragonfly on its nose. Under the chapter titled “The Flowering of an American Style,” Farnham’s bowl for the 1900 Paris Exhibition is a take on a Hupa Indian basket in silver and copper with American turquoise rattlesnake handles. Art Nouveau is represented in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Byzantine-style three-handled chalice with emeralds and turquoises.
In contemporary times, Loring writes, Elsa Peretti helped bring silver jewelry back into fashion. Her organically formed pitcher from 1984 demonstrates her admiration for Japanese craftsmanship as well as her love of nature and organic forms.
Although this is Loring’s 11th book on the subject of Tiffany design--two more are on the way--it is fresh in its depiction of an American style in silversmithing that has flourished for so long. Loring puts the design in a historical context so the reader understands why and how it happened.
The pictures of these works, most found today only in museums or private collections, are astonishing. Where else could one find a silver and copper buffalo loving cup with handles in the form of bison horns resting on bison heads and hoofs?
Kathy Bryant can be reached at kbryant@socal.rr.com.
