Artistic wares of George W. Shiebler, silversmith

Magazine Antiques, July, 1995 by Janet Zapata, D. Albert Soeffing

Shiebler (Pl. I) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and lived as a child in Washington, D.C., where he became a messenger for the Western Union Telegraph Company.(1) In 1867 he was hired as a traveling salesman by Jahne, Smith and Company, a manufacturer of gold chains at 170 Broadway in New York City. When both Jahne and Smith died in 1870 or 1871, their business was absorbed by the partnership of A. J. G. Hodenpyl, Pierre T. Tunison, and Shiebler. Shiebler left this partnership in 1874 and within two years bought the silver spoon manufacturing business of Coles and Reynolds (which in turn had earlier taken over A. and W. Wood). On March 4, 1876, Shiebler and five employees began to operate Coles and Reynolds under Shiebler's name. In 1877 he bought the firm of John Polhamus (Polhamus having died that year), followed five years later by his acquisition of the factory of Morgan Morgans Jr., the successor to Albert Coles.

By the 1880's Shiebler employed sixty workers in his showroom at 8 Liberty Place in New York City and his factory in the Ketchum building at York and Washington Streets in Brooklyn. When that factory became too small, he moved into three floors of a building at the corner of St. Mark's and Underhill Avenues in Brooklyn, where he had between 160 and 170 employees. On January 1, 1892, the firm incorporated as George W. Shiebler and Company with a capital stock of $300,000. George Shiebler was president and his brother William F. was treasurer.(2) On August 1 of that year they opened a large store at 179 Broadway in Manhattan, moving on February 1, 1897, to the second floor of the Decker Building at 33 Union Square [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. In 1900 they moved the store to 5 and 7 Maiden Lane, where they remained until the business closed in 1907. In addition to selling from his showroom, Shiebler kept an office at which retailers from out of town could buy wholesale, and he sent traveling salesmen around the country with samples of his wares.(3)

At first Shiebler continued to produce the flatware patterns of the firms he had acquired.(4) He then created his own patterns, including Montezuma (Pl. VIII) and a number of patterns that incorporate more than one decorative motif.(5) In the Flora pattern, for example, a variety of flowers are depicted on tablespoons, dinner forks, and dessert spoons, while each of the twelve teaspoons not only displays a different flower but has a stem of a different shape.(6) Fifteen separate dies were required for this pattern. In the Fiorito pattern, which the firm advertised as "strewn with flowers,"(7) the outline of the pieces was uniform, but the flowers varied. Thus teaspoons had a peony, dessert spoons a poppy, tablespoons a clematis, dinner forks a tulip, and dessert forks an iris.

In 1892 the company advertised a selection of Vienna coffee spoons with enameled handles similar to the strawberry forks shown in Plate XVII. Each piece was numbered consecutively from one to twelve, and they could be purchased either in assorted designs or all of one pattern.

Like nearly all silver firms at the time, Shiebler's produced souvenir spoons. His first known example, patented on May 19, 1891, commemorates the port city of Baltimore (Pl. VII). Appropriately, the handle includes a turtle, a crab, shells, and seaweed, while the gilded bowl in the shape of a clam shell shows the monument at North Point, a memorial to the Battle of Baltimore, which ended the War of 1812. Shiebler also made souvenir spoons for New York City and Boston, as well as one to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing, one for the United States Navy, and one depicting Saint John the Divine.

Among the first medallion flatware patterns Shiebler offered was one originally made by John Polhamus, who patented it on May 9, 1865.(8) The cameo portrait, like others of the period, is set against a stippled background and encircled by a border to simulate an ancient Greek coin. About 1882, while continuing to replicate heads from Greek mythology, Shiebler dispensed with the surrounding background and border and placed the heads directly into the end of irregularly shaped handles with hammered backgrounds (see Pl. V). Some of these heads are gilt, and because of the "14K" stamped on the back of the pieces, it was thought that the medallions were cast in gold and then applied.(9) However, closer examination reveals that the portraits are integral to the pieces and were either plated with a thin layer of fourteen karat gold or made in the rolled gold process.

Before he introduced his redesigned medallion flatware, Shiebler brought out a line of jewelry he called "curio medallion," which was designed to look as though it had been "unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum."(10) The medallions were added to brooches (see Pl. VI), made into bracelets (see Pl. XIII), cufflinks, and, finally, used on flatware and hollow ware. The portraits were based on images in pattern books of ancient sculpture.(11) The image of Achilles hanging from the scimitar brooch in Plate VI, for example, is after Plate 71 in R. Ackerman, Knight's Gems of Device Book - Modern and Antique Gems Originally for Seal Engravers, But for General Utility.(12) Some American manufacturers imitated this jewelry, as did French and English jewelers. Makers in Birmingham, England, called this the "Homeric style,"(13) a description that Shiebler used in his own advertising in 1900.(14)