Museum accessions.(Hispanic Society of America)

From its founding in 1904, the Hispanic Society of America in New York City has been a leader in exhibitions and publications on Spanish culture in the old world and the new. Its collections, which are unparalleled in their scope and quality outside the Iberian Peninsula, have recently been enriched by the addition of the eighteenth-century silver-gilt tray illustrated above. It was made in the Andean plateaus of eastern Bolivia or Peru, and like virtually all Hispanic silver, it incorporates multiple decorative techniques--punchwork, repousse, chasing, and engraving--that together form a vibrant yet harmonous whole. The central rosette is abstract but the other flowers seem to be poppies, a motif rarely seen in the colonial Andes but found on the many Asian textiles imported into the Spanish viceroyalties by ships traversing the Pacific Ocean from Manila to South America by way of Mexico. A particularly local motif is the curled-up chinchilla above and below the central flower. What appears to be an export mark on the back suggests that about 1790 the tray was exported from Buenos Aires, then the capital of the viceroyalty of the Rio de La Plata. The name comes from the Rio de la Plata, or silver river, which got its name from the silver brought down it from Bolivia to Buenos Aires. The tray was acquired by Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III of England, who assembled a large collection of silver. She apparently had the tray gilded and used it as part of a spectacular silver service at the center of her dining table. It is on view until December 31 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the major exhibition Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820, organized in collaboration with the Hispanic Society.

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I an Woodner was a voracious art collector who amassed one of ...