It is hard to imagine a more successful undertaking than “Silversmiths to The Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808‱842.”
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‱840” by Stuart P. Feld in The Magazine Antiques in October 2007.)
Thomas Charles Fletcher (1787‱866) was born in Alstead, N.H. His future partner, Sidney Gardiner (1787‱827), 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.”
In 1811, Fletcher and Gardiner moved to Philadelphia, a city twice Boston’s size with three times its commercial activity. It was the best business calculation they ever made. Two years later, the firm was known, as the authors write, “as the creator of the heaviest, tallest, most ornate, elegant and patriotic work in silver produced in the country to that date.”
Through wide advertising, arrangements with other retailers and word of mouth, Fletcher & Gardiner’s practice became an international one, producing presentation, household, church and personal objects in gold and silver for customers from New Hampshire to New Orleans to Mexico. Always looking to open new markets and receptive to the latest innovations in design, manufacture and marketing, Fletcher traveled to Europe twice, in 1815 and 1825, where he was dazzled by current styles inspired by classical antiquity.
The show includes many specific examples of these stylistic influences: a circa 1835 sauceboat in the collection of Ruth J. Nutt is in shape and ornament inspired by contemporary French silver. Also in the Nutt collection, a hot water urn of roughly the same date relates to one from the London silver manufactory Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, where Fletcher is known to have admired a silver vase copied from a large Roman marble owned by the Earl of Warwick.
Fletcher and Gardiner were in the right place, Philadelphia, and at the right time. On June 18, 1812, Congress declared war on Great Britain. Two months later, Captain Isaac Hull (1773‱843) led the US frigate Constitution in a decisive battle against Britain’s Guerriere off the coast of Newfoundland. The grateful public raised funds for “a splendid piece of Plate” to be presented to Hull. Fletcher & Gardiner won the commission.
Fennimore and Wagner write that the resulting 29½-inch-tall Hull urn “has no known contemporary model,” but drew heavily on engravings of antiquities and European goldsmiths’ work. It employed nearly every technique, including the liberal application of die-cast and die-rolled ornament, a Fletcher & Gardiner signature. Surmounted by an American eagle finial and terminating in hairy-paw feet, the urn weighed 502 ounces, cost $2,200 and took nearly a year to make.
“Fletcher & Gardiner came out of the gate gangbusters,” reflects Fennimore. “Virtually nothing like the Hull urn had ever been made in American silver in its scale, weight, scope and elaboration. It spoke to their grand vision in so many ways.”
The Hull urn resulted in a slew of other commissions for urns, vases, cake baskets, pitchers and swords honoring heroes of the War of 1812 and other conflicts. Some of these trophies are notable for their scale; others, including several Society of Cincinnati badges, for their intricacy and diminutive proportions. A gold, enamel and ruby Society of Cincinnati badge made for Winifred Scott (1786‱866) is in the collection of the US Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Another rarity, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a meticulously worked gold frame enclosing a portrait miniature on ivory of Francis Kinlock Huger (1773‱855). Fletcher & Gardiner made it as gift for the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited Charleston, S.C.
Fennimore and Wagner drew upon a substantial collection of Thomas Fletcher letters and drawings scattered among five institutions. The drawings are analyzed in depth by Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Beth Carver Wees, who contributed a catalog chapter.
“These archives opened up a wonderful venue of exploration and allowed us rich access to the mind of an artisan, how an idea expresses itself on paper and how it moves into the three-dimensional realm,” says Fennimore.
The book is not closed on Fletcher & Gardiner metalwares.
“The firm was a very important manufacturer of jewelry but, try as we might, we could not find much of it,” says Fennimore. “There is also a significant body of Fletcher & Gardiner ecclesiastical silver that deserves further study.”
Fletcher & Gardiner adapted new production methods to satisfy a large and expanding audience of affluent consumers. Despite its founders’ ambitions, the firm suffered a series of reversals and began its steady decline after Gardiner’s death from yellow fever in Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1827. Fletcher & Gardiner closed in 1842. Thomas Fletcher spent his last years cobbling together an income. He died in 1866, age 79, at his son’s house in New Jersey.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a symposium, “American Silver of the Early Nineteenth Century,” is planned for Friday and Saturday, September 5 and 6, at Winterthur. Speakers will include Janet Zapata, Ann Wagner, Donald L. Fennimore, Margaret Little, Deborah Dependahl Waters, D. Albert Soeffling, Bert Denker, Emily Guthrie and E. Richard McKinstry,
Published by Winterthur and distributed by the Antique Collectors’ Club, Silversmiths to The Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808‱842 is by Donald L. Fennimore and Ann K. Wagner, with contributions from Cathy Matson of the University of Delaware, Deborah Dependahl Waters of the Museum of the City of New York and Beth Carver Weiss of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hardcover edition costs $95.
Men of and for their time, Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner created objects that in their majesty, stature and originality spoke to the brightest ambitions of their age.
For information, 800-448-3883 or www.Winterthur.org .
