John M. Phillips, former director of Yale University Art gallery, holds one of the earliest known pieces of American silver: a dram-cup by the Boston partners John Hull and Robert Sanderson.

 

Publish or Polish

From Yale, The Last Word On Massachusetts Silver

By Laura Beach

NEW HAVEN, CONN. -- Publish or perish, scholars are told. Alarmingly, some in Yale's American arts office seem to have taken the old bromide to heart.

In what has become one of the most heroic sagas of decorative arts research, the Yale University Art Gallery is closing the book Ï chapter and verse Ï on a project that began nearly a century ago. Arriving in the museum shop this fall is the five pound, 1,000-page Colonial Massachusetts Silversmiths and Jewelry, a dizzyingly comprehensive biographical dictionary based on the notes of the legendary Yale professor John Marshall Phillips (1905-1953) and Francis Hill Bigelow (1859-1933), a scholar/dealer instrumental in building Yale's renowned silver collection.

Figuratively buried under the mountain of detail they unearthed, Bigelow and Phillips went to their reward without having gone to print. They left it to Patricia E. Kane, Yale's curator of American decorative arts, to follow the paper trail back to its beginnings in Boston at the turn of the century. In doing so, Kane dramatically illustrates the scholarly progress made in a field in its infancy only a century ago.

To begin at the beginning, we return to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where a crafty collector parlayed his expertise into an influential role as an adviser to two collecting giants, Judge A.T. Clearwater and Francis P. Garvan.

Born in 1859 in Cambridge, Mass., Francis Hill Bigelow retired in 1906 at the ripe age of 47, leaving a lifetime job with a Boston import firm to pursue his interest in antiques. As Elizabeth Stillinger relates in her 1980 book The Antiquers, that was the year that Bigelow, a charter member of the arch antiquarian Walpole Society, organized "American Silver," the landmark show and catalogue at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Soliciting clients as early as 1909, Bigelow by 1916 had found a major customer in Francis Garvan. A trove of correspondence between the two at Yale reveals a wiliness that made Bigelow less than popular with Boston's old guard. "There is a psychological moment in which to kill the owner and escape with the tankard which you do not appreciate," he wrote to Garvan. "....I have to....approach stealthily - so you must be patient or we lose it altogether."

Museum ethics apparently less explicit then than they are now, Bigelow the wheeler dealer continued as honorary curator of silver at the MFA. He was a driving force behind a 1911 display of American church silver jointly organized by the MFA and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and advised E. Alfred Jones on his 1913 book, Old Silver of American Churches. In 1917, Bigelow published Historic Silver of the Colonies and Its Makers, the first survey guide of its kind.

Living in Cambridge, Bigelow had access to the most detailed data on American silversmiths anywhere - the deeds and probate records of Suffolk County, of which Boston is the seat. "Bigelow did a phenomenal amount of research," acknowledges Kane. "He hired two court employees to read all the records and write down every reference to silversmiths. The drafts are detailed and useful."

With that Kane disappears to her office, a cubby in the loft-like, third-floor corridor that houses Yale's curators of American paintings and decorative arts. She returns with a black three-ring binder, one of 15 containing a yellowed collage of scratch paper, purloined letterhead, photostats and shredded envelopes. Sweeping across ruled paper in faded black ink are Bigelow's notations, overlaid with annotations and addenda in Phillips' tighter, more energetic hand. In the computing age, such physical evidence of scholarly collaboration would surely have been lost.

"This is the wonderful thing about Suffolk deeds," says Kane, flipping the volume open to a 1727 entry for Thomas Edwards. "The deed was witnessed by Thomas Coverly and Joseph Marion. It happens that Coverly is a silversmith who was then probably less than 21 years old, so you can hypothesize that he was an apprentice of Thomas Edwards. We are often able to document the apprentices or journeymen who happened to be in the shop. It's a way of establishing craft ties." She pauses, then adds, "The other thing they tell you is whether they speculated in real estate, where they moved, how their careers advanced Ï the details of their lives."

Bigelow died in 1933, having failed to complete his planned dictionary. "When John Marshall Phillips got a hold of this material, he decided to limit it to Massachusetts silversmiths because the data was so much richer than from other areas," says Kane. She adds ominously, "But Phillips died very suddenly in 1953."

Thanks in no small part to Bigelow's aggressive salesmanship, Francis P. Garvan assembled a silver collection of unsurpassed quality. An 1897 graduate of Yale who practiced law and served in a variety of public posts, Garvan and his wife, Mabel Brady, built one of the great early collections of American antiques.

In 1930, the Garvans began giving it all to Yale, installing John Marshall Phillips as curator. "Phillips was the greatest scholar of American silver of his time," Kane asserts. "He came from Kennett Square, Penn., and had worked with Maurice Brix, who in 1920 published a list of Philadelphia silversmiths. His real passion was early American silver - Garvan's passion. Garvan collected in all areas, but he really loved silver best."

At lecture engagements around the country, Kane often meets former students who recall the popular professor fondly. "In the 30s and the 40s, Phillips taught a famous course nicknamed `Pots and Pans.' George Bush once told The New York Times that it was his favorite course at Yale," the curator says slyly.

Having acquired Bigelow's papers from his executor, Phillips spent the next 23 years elaborating on his findings. "When I first started this project the papers were still in the Suffolk County Courthouse," Kane recalls. Repeated entries in the visitors' book were sure signs that when school was out in New Haven, Phillips was in Boston pouring over the records.

"Bigelow had the references in his papers, but he hadn't necessarily gone through all the court files. Phillips went back to the Suffolk deeds, and filled in information and other documents," says the curator, fingering an attached snippet from Benjamin Walker's diary, turned up by Phillips at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In 1939, Phillips mounted "Masterpieces of Early American Silver" at Yale. A decade later, he published a small stylistic survey on the subject, but his dictionary remained unfinished upon his untimely death in 1953.

Phillips' papers were far from orderly when assistant curator Josephine Setze took possession of them after her mentor's passing. Bits and scraps of research spanning nearly half a century were gathered, sorted and numbered by Setze, who added her own delicate notations to her predecessors' robust scrawl. For years, Setze guarded the magpie's assortment like a hawk. "I think she very much revered and admired Phillips, and wanted to see his legacy preserved," says Kane. "She didn't want his work to be ripped off and used by others without credit."

Intent on getting the dictionary into print, Setze gave Yale $30,000 in 1968. Kane - a Winterthur fellow whose classmates included Dwight Lanmon, Ed Nygren, Benno Forman, Toby Hall, Quinta Symonds, Ray Shepherd, Dorothy Elleson and Lew Sharp - arrived at the University the same year, filling a position in the furniture study vacated by John Kirk, who had decamped for the Rhode Island Historical Society. She was promoted to associate curator and, after the death of Charles F. Montgomery a decade later, became full curator.

Setze gradually loosened her iron grip, allowing supervised use of the papers by graduate students and staff. Gerald W.R. Ward, now the Peter and Carolyn Lynch associate curator of American decorative arts and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, consulted them for his dissertation on Salem silver. His wife, Barbara McLean Ward, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, incorporated them into her doctoral work on Boston goldsmiths. Kane's own dissertation was on Boston's first masters, John Hull and Robert Sanderson, Sr.

"We realized as we used this material that it was a rich repository of primary research," recalls the curator, who by the mid-1980s was determined to put the papers into final, publishable form. With the backing of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia and Leonard Marx Publications Fund, she has been working on the project actively since 1987, never imagining how involving it would be. Text began going to the typesetter a year ago, and since May, she has been checking footnotes.

Much time was spent retracing those first steps taken so many years ago by Bigelow. "I did a lot of it myself, but I had the help of more than a dozen Yale graduate students. One spent a summer in Boston. All she did was verify Suffolk County deeds and make photocopies," Kane says. Entries were checked, double-checked and checked again. To her surprise, they were amazingly accurate. "There were occasional mistakes, and a few tantalizing things that I have not been able to find. Finally, I gave up and simply said, `Bigelow says this in his papers. We haven't been able to verify it.'"

Edited by Kane, Colonial Massachusetts Silversmiths and Jewelers: A Biographical Dictionary Based on the Notes of Francis Hill Bigelow and John Marshall Phillips contains minutely detailed biographies of every known Massachusetts silversmith by Kane, Barbara and Gerald Ward, Jeannine Falino and Deborah Federhen, plus related essays by Kane and the Wards. "It will be more information than some people are ever going to want to look at," acknowledges the curator. "We try to reproduce all the known marks that can be recorded, and we're reproducing a lot of the original documents. We list the surviving work with related marks. We give the inscription if it is known, who owned it, and the approximate date. We give one reference - not all - and if it is owned by an institution, we record that, too."

Noted are more than 6,000 pieces, all made by craftsmen who were born by 1754 and worked before the Revolution. The earliest silver catalogued - John Hull's beaker made for the First and Second Church in Boston - dates to circa 1650. Works by Colonial silversmiths, such as Paul Revere, Jr, Benjamin Burt and John Coburn that postdate the Revolution are also included. Only the companion essays are illustrated.

Though more factual than interpretative, the dictionary is rife with implication for its editor, who says it has changed the way she thinks about craft alliances. "The story is very similar to the one Brock Jobe told many years ago about the Boston furniture trades. The genius of a major silversmith was his ability to organize labor to bring wonderful objects cooperatively and competitively to the market.

"A mark on a piece of Boston silver will certainly tell you who retailed it, but it won't necessarily tell you who made it. We know that there are a number of people for whom no signed work is known. They clearly spent their lives making objects that other people sold.

"Probably," says Kane with Saharan aridity, "We could figure it all out if we had a little more time."