Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2001 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

About twenty years ago Alan and Simone Hartman began collecting English silver, focusing on works in the baroque and rococo styles. The net result, one of the finest such private collections in the world, has recently been acquired by partial gift and purchase by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which already possessed exceptional holdings of English silver of other periods. Today the museum can boast one of the most comprehensive surveys of English silver from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in the United States.

The Hartman Collection is particularly strong in the work of Huguenot and other foreign-born silversmiths who began to bring innovative designs and techniques to London in the second half of the seventeenth century As Christopher Hartop discusses in The Huguenot Legacy: English Silver 1680-1760, from the Alan and Simone Hartman Collection (Thomas Heneage, London, 1996), the time was ripe for a flowering in English silver. The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 sparked a period of great economic growth. Demand from the aristocracy, gentry, and a growing number of prosperous merchants at the top of the social scale fueled an intense market for luxury silver, one driven by a desire for new styles and forms. The influx of Huguenot silversmiths came just at the right moment to fill these needs, and in the process stimulated a period of unsurpassed creativity in English silver:

The Torah, a scroll containing the five books of Moses, is central to Jewish law and learning. As a mark of respect and veneration, Torahs are often decorated, and a crown is frequently part of this adornment One of the most magnificent such crowns has recently been presented to the Gilbert Collection by Sir Arthur Gilbert, in celebration of the collection's first anniversary at Somerset House in London. Illustrated below, the crown is made of gold and set with rubies, emeralds, diamonds, turquoises, and amethysts. It was probably made in Vienna about 1825 and is said to have originally been for the private use of Rabbi Israel Ruzhin, whose establishment in Ruzhin (in modern-day Ukraine) was known for its opulence. A rare gold and bejeweled article of Jewish ritual art, the crown matches the quality of workmanship that is the hallmark of the Gilbert Collection's holdings.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the "wild" American West was rapidly disappearing into the shadowy world of myth and legend, and a whole iconography about it was growing in both literature and art. The American Indian as a noble savage became quite popular as a theme in painting and in the decorative arts, as can be seen on the cup illustrated above. The cup was made by Tiffany and Company, and its chased scene of American Indians on horseback hunting a herd of bison is derived from George Catlin's painting Buffalo Chase of 1847 (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma). Tiffany and Company experimented with a variety of Indian-related motifs in its silver. Besides incorporating Images such as Catlin's, the firm also made objects inspired directly by American Indian forms, such as bowls and baskets.

Engraved on the bottom of the cup is "Eugene Higgins/1900," presumably referring to the Eugene Higgins (1860-1948) who was a prominent figure in late nineteenth-century New York City society. During the spring and summer of 1900, he entertained King Christian XI of Denmark, Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, and Emperor William I of Germany aboard his yacht, Varuna, and it is possible that one of them presented the cup to him in appreciation.

Henry Ford and Bill Gates would surely recognize Matthew Boulton as a fellow innovator and business entrepreneur. The son of an eighteenth-century Birmingham, England, buckle and toy maker (or maker of such small metal objects as boxes and watch chains), Matthew Boulton developed an enormous enterprise that made everything from metal buttons to fine silver and ormolu. The variety and quality of his wares have long attracted collectors, not least of all Mr. and Mrs. James C. Codell Jr., who assembled a collection of some two hundred pieces over several decades. In 1993, after his wife's death, Mr. Codell made a partial and promised gift of the collection to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and in the past year the bulk of it has come to the museum.

Boulton targeted the wealthy as his best customers and produced for them an amazing array of objects. Illustrated here is a spectacular candelabrum from one of his most ambitious product lines--objects that combined ormolu and stone. The likes of the earl of Stamford and the Prince of Wales are known to have owned examples of these candelabra. Boulton began making ormolu in 1768 to compete with the French, and this design dates from about 1775.