‘Silversmiths To The Nation: Thomas Fletcher And Sidney Gardiner: 1808–1842’

Winterthur, Del.

:It is hard to imagine a more successful undertaking than "Silversmiths to The Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808–1842."

At Winterthur Museum through September 21, the exhibition, which opened in New York in late 2007 and will close in Palm Beach, Fla., in January 2009, assembles some of the most spectacular American silver ever made, from monumental presentation urns and vases to gold-hilted swords.

The show and its companion catalog create a rich context for these wares through the close study of associated prints, drawings, letters and shop records. Using more than 100 Fletcher & Gardiner creations, organizers tell a compelling story about art, culture, economics and politics in the United States in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, when war heroes and captains of industry — Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and De Witt Clinton among them — were lionized by proud citizens of the young republic.

Donald L. Fennimore laid the foundations for "Silversmiths to The Nation" as a graduate student at Winterthur nearly four decades ago. During his long career as the museum's curator of metalwork, Fennimore, now curator emeritus, penned key works on Winterthur's copper and iron collections before at last returning to his thesis topic. His successor, Ann K. Wagner, followed her mentor's lead, also writing her thesis on Fletcher & Gardiner silver, specifically their presentation pieces.

Momentum for an exhibition gathered when Dr Richard Weiss and Dr Sandra Harmon-Weiss, collectors and friends of the museum, wrote to Winterthur's departing director Leslie Greene Bowman. Citing "American Silver," the landmark 1906 catalog and show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, they asked, "Could Winterthur consider a plan to 'get up' a similar exhibition on the 100th anniversary of this enormously important primary exhibition?" As a fillip, 2008 marks the bicentennial of Fletcher & Gardiner's Boston debut.

Remarkably, little had been published on Fletcher & Gardiner silver. (For a fascinating account of why it took so long for such sumptuous objects to be reconsidered, see "Making An Uncollectible Collectible: American Silver, 1810–1840" by Stuart P. Feld in The Magazine Antiques in October 2007.)

Thomas Charles Fletcher (1787–1866) was born in Alstead, N.H. His future partner, Sidney Gardiner (1787–1827), hailed from eastern Long Island, where the Gardiners were well established. The partners opened their first shop at 43 Marlboro Street in Boston in November 1808. Their conservative early work includes a hair bracelet now at the Massachusetts Historical Society and two-handled communion cups made for churches in Plymouth and Hadley, Mass.

"I feel I know both men reasonably well," says Fennimore, whose collaborator, Wagner, was traveling abroad with Winterthur's Collectors' Circle when interviewed for this article. "Both men were fired with real ambition, were hugely energetic and farsighted and wanted to leave their mark. Fletcher would seem to have been the more articulate and educated of the two, which was an advantage for us. It was Fletcher's work that provided the manuscript material. He was a superb businessman and had a good sense of the market and where it was going. He was also sensitive artistically. Gardiner was a superb craftsman who was able to pick up a hammer and create a great object from just a drawing. He pretty much oversaw the shop. The men had tremendous respect for one another."