Making an uncollectible collectible: American silver, 1810-1840.

"Don't ever buy a piece of American silver made after 1800" was the refrain I heard in the mid-1960s in response to my initial inquiries to several dealers about the availability of early nineteenth-century American silver. "It is all junk." After having collected what has variously been described as American Empire, late Federal, or neoclassical furniture for about a half-dozen years, about 1964 I began to wonder who the parallels in "my" period were to such silversmiths as Paul Revere, Jacob Hurd, Myer Myers, and the Richardsons, who had long ago established reputations as the worthy contemporaries of Benjamin Randolph, John Seymour, the Goddard-Townsend dynasty, and their most gifted eighteenth-century cabinetmaking contemporaries.

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In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city, an extraordinary pair of footed sauceboats with snake handles by the Philadelphia silversmith Anthony Rasch (see Fig. 2) provided me with an important clue that nineteenth-century American silver was not all a wasteland. In 1963 the sauceboats had been included in a landmark survey exhibition, Classical America, 1815-1845, at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, where the decorative arts section was curated by Berry B. Tracy (1933-1984). There they reigned supreme among the more than forty pieces of silver on display. Nonetheless, some of the other pieces provided additional evidence that extraordinary riches in the field of American neoclassical silver probably lay hidden--forgotten and misunderstood--in cupboards and drawers across the land. In retrospect, we were, of course, on the threshold of the rediscovery of much that is universally revered today in the canon of American art from 1800 to 1900 and beyond, including furniture masterpieces by Duncan Phyfe, Honore Lannuier, and the Herter Brothers, the panoramic landscapes of the Hudson River school, the glorious range of still lifes from Raphaelle Peale to John Fredrick Peto, and the unique creations of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the brothers Greene and Greene, to name but a few of the artists and areas that were gradually rescued from the dustbins of neglect.

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In the autumn of 1965, Tracy, who by now had become my colleague at the Metropolitan Museum, and I visited Clifford J. Nuttall's renowned Eastern States Fair at the Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York, which was then considered one of the country's most important shows featuring Americana. There, I saw in the booth of the Johnsons of Hadley, Massachusetts, a beautiful and very chaste silver coffeepot featuring finely detailed die-rolled borders, a fabulous cast anthemion applied to the underbelly of the spout, and a nicely carved wooden handle that still retained much of its original blackened, or ebonized, surface. (1) The mark, or touch, of Harvey Lewis of Philadelphia meant nothing to me, except that I remembered the name from a beautiful inkwell in the Newark Museum exhibition. (2) Further, in the booth of legendary Americana dealers Avis and Rockwell ("Rocky") Gardiner of Stamford, Connecticut, I was attracted to a very large ewer marked by John Wolfe Forbes (1781-1864) of New York, which was elaborately adorned with repousse decoration, including a depiction of the arms of the State of New York, and a variety of cast ornament, including an eagle perched atop the handle, all of which was meant to enhance a piece that was gushingly inscribed in the spirit of the day to a Colonel James A. Moore as a "token of Respect." (3) I bought neither piece at the time, but decided that both were worthy of further investigation. Focusing first on the Lewis pot, I learned cumulatively from the various silver dictionaries that had been compiled by the Enskos, Ernest M. Currier, and Seymour B. Wyler that Lewis had worked in Philadelphia from about 1811 to about 1825. Although I could find little else in print about him, I decided to go ahead and acquire the coffeepot. Its quality was indeed superb, even in the context of all that I have seen since. It did take me a while to realize, however, that I had bought an incomplete object, in that the pot would certainly originally have been part of a five- or six-piece tea and coffee service.