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

It is hard to imagine a more successful undertaking than “Silversmiths to The Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808-1842.” At Winterthur Museum in Delaware 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. ...Read More