By Kate Eagen Johnson
WILLIAMSBURG, VA. — It is absolutely fitting that a new display of Colonial Williamsburg’s permanent silver collection marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of its DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. The exhibition “Silver from Mine to Masterpiece,” on view through January 7, 2018, features approximately 170 objects ranging in date from a circa 1530 tumbaga — an ingot of melted-down Aztec and Inca treasure recovered from a Spanish shipwreck off Grand Bahama Island — to a tureen by New York silversmith William L. Adams made circa 1835. Roughly two-thirds of the objects are British in origin. The rest are American.
The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum’s galleries give visitors access to wonderful art and artifacts that are either inappropriate for, or not fully appreciated in, Colonial Williamsburg’s historic room settings. A bit of background is in order to better understand the connection between the silver collection and the development of this museum space.
A partnership between the Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller Jr resulted in the establishment of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 1926, the leading place-based museum of American history.
For most of CW’s first half-century, curatorial decisionmakers acquired English decorative arts of the finest quality to represent the fact that colonial governors and wealthy Southern colonists possessed a penchant for English-made silver and other furnishings. Early curators incorporated often spectacular objects into grand and glorious room settings that illustrated Eighteenth Century ideals of beauty, gentility and taste, if not the actual historical circumstances of colonial Virginia. Nowhere was this more evident than in the elaborate interiors of the Governor’s Palace, a reconstructed building designed by Perry, Shaw & Hepburn that opened to the public in 1934. The décor of the Governor’s Palace was on a near equal footing with palaces and other aristocratic domiciles in England.
As an example of CW’s early curatorial approach, change-agent curator Graham Hood noted in “Palace Days, Recollections of Dismantling the Most Beautiful Rooms in America,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Winter 2000/01), how a space known to have been a butler’s pantry historically was furnished as an intimate family dining room “replete with English royal silver and great ducal furniture.” By the late 1970s, the curatorial reconsideration of the Governor’s Palace and other buildings — based on extensive research conducted by Hood, Wallace Gusler and many others — resulted not only in a contretemps about period-room presentation and interpretation that reverberated through museumland, but also in a cache of objects which, though fantastic in their own right, were no longer deemed accurate for colonial Virginia interiors.
Rather than launching a deaccessioning initiative after the Governor’s Palace was reinstalled in 1981 — an act that might have added more fuel to a fire already raging over perceived Atrocities Against Beauty, Patriotism and Sacrosanct Interior Design — the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum was created in 1985 as a home for these and other objects.
“Silver from Mine to Masterpiece” begins with an exploration of silver as an elemental mineral and the tools used to fashion it before introducing visitors to the tour de force English silver for which Colonial Williamsburg is well known. Perhaps chief among the showpieces is the fabled 50-pound, ten-branch silver chandelier made for King William III in the 1690s that bears the mark of Daniel Garnier. One of its rivals for attention is the spectacular epergne and stand commissioned from the London silversmith George Wickes in the early 1740s by Joseph Leeson for his country estate Russborough in County Wicklow, recently returned from the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690–1840.”
Aside from its epic English silver holdings, Colonial Williamsburg also possesses an outstanding fused silver, or Sheffield plate, collection which, Janine E. Skerry, CW’s curator of metals, points out is the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world.
Since assuming her position in 2009, Skerry’s goal has been to achieve a better balance in the metal holdings across the board and, in regard to silver, to add more of American make. She observes, “American silver was not a major interest of my predecessors. This was in part due to the longstanding belief that Southern colonists preferred to buy English silver. There is some truth to this and part of it has to do with planters’ basis of credit in England. But the English story has overridden the story of silversmithing in America, imports from other countries and the peripatetic nature of silver objects. Colonial Williamsburg is coming to American silver late as an institutional collector, but we do have a strategy.”
Colonial Williamsburg’s recent institutional turn-of-gaze toward American silver is illustrated through a section of the exhibition devoted to new acquisitions. Most of the objects illustrated in this article are drawn from that part of the exhibition.
Asked what she pursues, Skerry remarks, “I look at acquisitions with a broad scope. Colonial Williamsburg collects objects made before 1840, with just a few exceptions. For exhibition purposes, I seek engaging hollowware forms. For study purposes, we collect flatware.”
She explains further, “We recognize flatware can be challenging. I remember a 1980s New Yorker cartoon titled ‘A Visit to the Spoon Museum.’ A family stands in front of cases of spoons and their faces look blank. I get the ‘implied tedium’ of the cartoon. Flatware is great for those interested in marks and in change in form over time, but most people just aren’t excited by an endless display of spoons, forks and knives.”
Enhancing diversity within the collection is an important aim. Skerry points to the chafing dish by John Burt, the hot water urn by Samuel Kirk and the smallsword by Thomas Edwards as forms in American silver new to Colonial Williamsburg.
Although this curator actively acquires silver made in New England and the Middle Atlantic, she is especially focused on securing the far rarer pieces made in the South. A creampot by Thomas You of Charleston, S.C., circa 1775, is expressive of her intent and is given pride of place as the introductory object to “Silver from Mine to Masterpiece.” A remarkable survival of the pre-Revolutionary War South, the creampot is one of about two dozen vessels known to have been fashioned by You, a silversmith and engraver of Huguenot descent. It is engraved with initials and a coat-of-arms, and Skerry is confident that research in progress will ultimately reveal the identity of the original owner. For more information on this artisan, see Gary Albert’s “Scratching the Surface: Thomas You, Charleston Silversmith, Engraver, and Patriot” in MESDA’s The Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (2012).
One of the most intriguing recent purchases is a pitcher created by Lewis Cary about 1826. Not only is it arrestingly handsome in its spare, almost contemporary design, but a happenstance of its construction illustrates how this precious metal was reworked over the centuries. Peering down inside the pitcher, one can see the mark of John Coney (1655/56–1722) on the interior bottom. Cary appropriated a round slab of silver, perhaps a lid from a flat-top tankard, stamped by the early Boston silversmith Coney for the bottom of his pitcher. Coney is also represented in the show by a circa 1700 oval sugar box.
The aforementioned tureen by William L. Adams speaks loudly to Skerry with its robust presence and muscularity as well as its careful design and fabrication. She also appreciates the paucity of American tureens made before the mid-Nineteenth Century, thus making this example with its circa 1835 date of manufacture both early and rare.
When asked if there are areas within the overall silver genre that are underappreciated, Skerry immediately responds, “the Early National or Empire period has been undervalued in celebration and in the marketplace for decades.” She cites as a personal favorite the bold, classically inspired style epitomized by the penultimate Philadelphia firm of Fletcher and Gardiner. Skerry is apparently taking advantage of such opportunities. A number of newcomers to the CW collection are ornamented by lion’s paws, acanthus leaves, palmettes and other motifs drawn from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.
This curator of metals continues to be surprised by how much extraordinary silver remains in private hands and on the market. She reflects that during her student days she was told, in so many words, that there was not much more to be revealed about colonial silver, “but not so… fabulous things are waiting to have their story told.”
DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum is at 326 Francis St West. For information, www.history.org or 757-229-1000.
