Silver in the Portland Art Museum - English silverware; Portland, Oregon

Magazine Antiques, June, 2002 by Christopher Hartop

There is a long-standing tradition of collecting English silver in Portland, Oregon. The largest museum in the Pacific Northwest, the Portland Art Museum, has one of the finest collections of silver on the West Coast, due in large part to William H. Nunn of Portland who, in 1955, bequeathed funds for "endowing and enlarging The Alice B. Nunn Memorial Collection of English Silver." (1) The Nunn collection was typical of the taste for antique silver in the United States at mid-century, with an emphasis on plain forms with strong outlines and little surface ornamentation. This style, often dubbed "Queen Anne," was avidly sought by collectors between the two world wars and formed the basis for the silver holdings in a number of museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The story of collecting silver in the United States is a fascinating one, and one that is yet to be written.

The William H. Nunn Trust Fund, combined with gifts from the Cabell family and other donors, has made it possible for the museum to add significant pieces to the collection so that it now reflects different aspects of recent scholarship. With the addition of some more elaborate pieces illustrating the baroque and rococo styles, as well as silver-gilt pieces, the collection now presents a comprehensive portrait of silver made in London from the fifteenth century to the Victorian period.

Prosperity has been as much a danger to the survival of silver as times of hardship and unrest. There is a wealth of English silver surviving from the eighteenth century but much of it was made from recycled earlier pieces. A rare survival from pre-Tudor days is the simple turned wooden bowl dating from the 1470s shown in Plate II, which has a silver-gilt rim and, on the inside, a circular silver disk that was probably originally enameled with stylized foliage. The relatively modest amount of silver used probably explains the bowl's survival. Mazers, as these mounted bowls are called, are believed to have been a common form of drinking bowl, often embellished with drinking inscriptions. In 1843 this example was given to All Hallows Church, Exeter, which sold it at auction after World War II. Many domestic silver objects, such as flagons, cups, and candlesticks, were given to churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when their functions had became obsolete or their styles had become unfashionable . By the 1840s, however, there was growing interest in antiques, and this bowl may well have been given to the church as a historical relic.

In the sixteenth century the rituals of eating and drinking had many of the quasi-religious elements of the Middle Ages. Salt, an expensive but vital commodity, continued to be of great importance, and a silver saltcellar was often the most elaborately embellished piece of plate in a household. More modest examples of standing salts became common in the Elizabethan period with growing prosperity among the lesser gentry and those of whom Daniel Defoe was later to describe as the middling sort. The late sixteenth-century salt in Plate III is more than a container for salt, however; its upper part, which is removable to reveal the receptacle for salt, also held ground spices. It is probably similar to one described in an inventory of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, in 1601 as "a double bell salt with a cover and pepper boxed gilt." (2) The salt was the only piece of silver, apart from plain dishes and platters, that would have been found on the table during a meal, for in the medieval tradition the food itself--elab orately presented pies, roasted meats, fish, or birds--provided the decoration.

Display silver was reserved for the buffet, or sideboard, where it served to show off the status of the owner. Among the objects set on the sideboard was often an array of cups, some of which were used for serving drinks, but the most impressive were generally purely decorative. The steeple cup of 1623-1624 (3) in Plate IV is a late example of a form popular in England during the reign of James I (r. 1603-1625), who probably introduced it from his native Scotland. (4) The "steeple" is clearly inspired by the architectural obelisks favored by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and others and has its roots in ancient symbolism. In the seventeenth century, such cups were referred to as "pinnacle" cups, and the term "steeple cup" appears to have been coined by the early twentieth-century authority Edward Alfred Jones. (5) This type of display cup, or cup of estate" as they were also known, continued to be popular in Britain and northern Europe well into the seventeenth century, while in France they had all bu t disappeared by 1600.

Another type of northern European display cup was the so-called guild cup, a vessel presented to a craft or trade guild to be displayed, and sometimes even passed around during guild ceremonies. A limited number of these have survived in England, mostly in the collections of city livery companies, but one of the most stunning examples is in the Portland Art Museum (Pl. V). Its stem is cast in the form of Atlas kneeling, but unfortunately the cup bears no engraved inscription or coat of arms to provide a clue to its original ownership. The piece first appears in a catalogue of the silver collection of Albert Denison (1805-1860), first baron Londesborough, published in 1860, where it is erroneously described as bearing "the Assay-office letter denoting its manufacture in the year 1613." (6) Scholarship and knowledge of hallmarks were in their infancy when the Londesborough catalogue appeared, and we can now see the Portland cup as an important example of the much later French classical style of the reign of Lo uis XIV (r. 1643-1715) imposed on a northern European form.