Philadelphia Antiques Show 2019

110 Curator’s Essay James C. Jones upon his successful election as the Whig governor of Tennessee. 5 The ewer incorporated scenes from Jones’s campaign surrounded by rocaille scrollwork interspersed with dogwood and rose blossoms. The Gorham vase and Reed ewer were atypical of American silver acquired in the first decades of the twentieth century. Most, such as a saucepan by Nathaniel Coleman (Fig. b), were very simple pieces in the early Neoclassical or Federal style that epitomized good taste in the first decade of the twentieth century. Philadelphia collectors at this time seem to have been interested in silver more as historical artifacts than as artistic masterpieces. Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth donated a collection of over 1700 “colonial relics” between 1902 and 1926, including about thirty pieces of silver, mostly jewelry. Another important early collector, Anna Lea Baker Carson, gave the museum over 850 objects, including over 250 pieces of silver, between 1906 and 1931. For over a century, exhibitions of silver at the museum have stimulated interest in the subject and inspired gifts to the collection. The first of these was the 1917 Exhibition of Old American and English Silver , organized by curator Sara Yorke Stevenson. 6 Despite the entry of the United States into World War I, this undertaking included more than four hundred objects. Many of the makers were not yet identified, and the exhibition was organized around histories of ownership. There was the inevitable teapot with a purported history of ownership by George Washington, but of more importance to present-day scholarship were objects gathered from local family collections, such as a pair of Richard Humphreys sauceboats made for George Emlen and a Joseph and Nathaniel Richardson covered ewer (Fig. c) made for Mary (Pemberton) Fox, all now in the museum’s collection but then lent by a descendant, Miss Hannah Fox. 7 In the 1920s, scholarship in the field of American decorative arts increased dramatically, and the museum’s collection of American silver grew concomitantly with the involvement of scholars and collectors in the Philadelphia area. Antiquarian Maurice Brix drew on years of research in newspaper advertisements, city directories, and legal records to create his List of Philadelphia Silversmiths and Allied Artificers , published in 1920, the first source to identify many of these craftsmen. His work informed the museum’s 1921 Loan Exhibition of Colonial Silver , organized by Samuel Woodhouse, keeper of collections. 8 Encompassing 439 objects, primarily American, but also English and European, this exhibition was organized by maker, with reproductions of a few of their marks in the catalogue. In the years immediately following, examples by early silversmiths were added to the collection, including an important group of objects purchased in 1922 that had descended in the Hamilton and Franks families of Philadelphia, among them a pair of tankards by Myer Myers. 9 Lydia Thompson Morris (1849–1932) gave and bequeathed objects that had descended in her family, such as a cann made by Joseph Richardson Sr. for Martha Chalkley with the engraved inscription “Made out of the Personal Silver effects of Thomas Chalkley, after his death at Tortola 1741.” 10 Lydia Morris also donated a bracelet (Fig. d) and earrings made by Tlingit or Haida Indians that she had bought on a trip to Sitka, Alaska, in 1885. The hiring of Fiske Kimball as director in 1925 and the museum’s move to its new building on Fairmount in 1928 signaled a shift in the institution’s mission. During his thirty year tenure, Kimball focused on creating an international art museum while maintaining study collections of decorative arts—in his words, “to place the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum,