Philadelphia Antiques Show 2019

113 Curator’s Essay extended to cover the whole history of art, above the Victoria and Albert.” 11 Accordingly, the acquisitions made for the museum’s collections of decorative arts were stylistically significant objects by leading makers. The first major example of Boston silver, a Baroque- style tankard made about 1714–20 by Edward Winslow, was purchased in 1929 by George Horace Lorimer. 12 Henry P. McIlhenny, who was appointed the first curator of decorative arts in 1934, shared Kimball’s vision, but aside from the 1940 bequest of collector R. Wistar Harvey, which included several significant examples of Philadelphia silver, the Depression and war years saw only modest acquisitions in this area. The watershed moment in the postwar years was the 1956 exhibition Philadelphia Silver 1682–1800 . 13 Although curated by McIlhenny with Assistant Curator Louis C. Madeira IV, the other guiding forces behind it were Phoebe Phillips Prime (widow of local antiquarian Alfred Coxe Prime and a scholar in her own right) and collector Walter M. Jeffords. This exhibition comprised 595 objects, organized by silversmith and featuring landmark objects from public and private collections, such as Philip Syng Jr.’s iconic inkwell from Independence National Historical Park. 14 Like its predecessors, this exhibition generated gifts and inspired acquisitions, including several from loans to the exhibition itself. A 1685–88 porringer made by Cesar Ghiselin for Anthony and Mary Morris was donated by Mrs. W. Logan MacCoy at the exhibition’s conclusion, and a tankard made by Johannis Nys for James and Sarah Logan, lent by Mrs. Maurice Brix, was purchased from the auction of her husband’s collection the following year. 15 Walter Jeffords of Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, was the most important local collector of silver prior to his death in 1960 and made many anonymous loans to the exhibition. 16 Beginning in 1948 he was a generous donor of American silver to the museum: in 1956 he donated thirty-five pieces of Philadelphia silver, many from the exhibition; three years later he and his wife gave thirty-two examples by Philip Syng Jr., including the bowl engraved with the coat-of-arms of the Lardner family (Fig. e). During the early 1950s Jeffords also strategized ways to acquire one of the stars of the 1956 exhibition: the hot water urn made in 1774 by Richard Humphreys, the earliest American-made object in the Neoclassical style (see Fig. g), but his efforts were unsuccessful. 17 The founding of the University Hospital Antiques Show (now the Philadelphia Antiques and Art Show) in 1962 increased interest in the field of early American silver by bringing specialist silver dealers to the city. American silver has been featured in many of the show’s loan exhibitions, most notably Philadelphia Silver in 1969 and A Touch of Class: Silver in Social Settings in 1996. 18 Over the years the show has been an important source for acquisitions by the museum, such as a rare cann made about 1740 by Henry Pratt of Philadelphia and most recently a tea service that the Gorham Manufacturing Company produced in 1897 to be sent to Japan for embellishment with cloisonné enamel. 19 As the exhibition title Philadelphia Silver 1682–1800 indicated, in the postwar years the museum’s American silver collection was focused on locally made objects from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This would change dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a larger trend in the field of American decorative arts. Henry McIlhenny retired in 1964 after thirty years as a curator, and Director Evan Turner appointed Calvin Hathaway as curator of decorative arts. A former director of the Cooper Union Museum in New York, Hathaway was interested in contemporary decorative arts and design, and in 1968 he proposed the purchase of a 1966 decanter made by Philadelphia silversmith Olaf e Philip Syng, Jr. (1703–1789), Bowl, about 1750. Silver, 3 7/16 x 6 7/8 inches (8.7 x 17.5 cm), weight 13 oz. 14 dwt. Gift of Walter M. Jeffords, 1959-2-16 f Olaf Skoogfors (1930–1975), Decanter, 1966. Silver and rose- wood, 11 1/2 x 3 3/4 inches (29.2 x 9.5 cm), gross weight 16 oz. Gift of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1968-2-1a,b