Philadelphia Antiques Show 2019

108 Curator’s Essay Collecting American Silver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1876–2019 David L. Barquist, the H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Curator of American Decorative Arts Silver has been made and acquired in Philadelphia from the earliest years of European settlement. Over the past 143 years, the collection of American silver and other precious metals at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has grown to include approximately three thousand objects. In addition to the nation’s most comprehensive representation of locally made silver, the museum’s holdings encompass work made in every region of the country, dating from the seventeenth century to the present day. This impressive assemblage was created by dedicated curators and private collectors who wanted to represent this aspect of the nation’s heritage at the museum with examples of outstanding artistic and historical importance. Founded after the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 on the model of London’s South Kensington Museum, the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art employed objects as inspiration for designers and craftsmen as well as to elevate public taste. 1 Collecting in the first years did not include large numbers of precious metals, despite the lavish displays made by European and American silver companies at the fair. Instead of silver, the museum focused on ceramics and textiles, perhaps because those industries were more significant to the economy of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Like the South Kensington Museum and the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Pennsylvania Museum also displayed a large group of electrotypes of famous silver objects in European collections. 2 The first pieces of silver specifically described as American to enter the museum’s collection were a group of otherwise unidentified spoons bequeathed by Mrs. Frederick Graff in 1897. 3 The following year the museum purchased its first piece of contemporary American silver, a vase made as part of the Gorham Manufacturing Company’s new Martelé line. 4 Much publicity surrounded the 1902 acquisition of the ewer made by Philadelphia silversmith Osmon Reed (Fig. a), as the “Henry Clay cup,” although in fact it was commissioned in 1843 by the Philadelphia Whig party for presentation to