Enfilade

From ACC Distribution:

A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1 December 2012 — 24 March 2013
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 20 April — 3 November 2013
Missouri History Museum, St Louis, 23 November 2013 — 2 March 2014
The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, 3 May 2014 — 25 May 2015

Deborah Dependahl Waters, A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection (Cambridge: John Adamson, 2013), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1898565116, $40.

Strength in design and fineness of craftsmanship unify the early American domestic and presentation silver assembled by Paul and Elissa Cahn and published together for the first time. Beginning in Boston with a caudle cup marked by Jeremiah Dummer, America’s first native-born silversmith, and objects from the shop of patriot silversmith Paul Revere, the book then focuses on New York, where a distinctive style reflecting the Dutch heritage of that region emerged, and afterward on Philadelphia, where generations of the Quaker Richardson family supplied goods of the “best sort, but plain.”

Pride of place is given to the work of New York Jewish silversmith Myer Myers and his shop, including a presentation waiter made for Theodorus Van Wyck. Accompanying a touring exhibition of the Cahn collection, the book encapsulates some of the ethnic, religious, and political diversity of early America and sets
the silver in its social and historical context.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword by Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Cahn Collection of Early American Silver – An Appreciation by David L. Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich Jr. Curator of American Decorative Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver and Silversmiths – An Introductory Essay
Catalogue
I: Boston
II: New York
III: Philadelphia
Frequent Bibliographical References and Note on Digital Resources
Index

Deborah Dependahl Waters is an independent historian of American decorative arts, specializing in silver and furniture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Since 1987 she has been a member of the part-time teaching faculty for the Parsons-Cooper-Hewitt M.A. Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, and is currently president of New York Silver Society, Inc. She is the editor and an author of Elegant Plate: Three Centuries of Precious Metals in New York City (2000), and a contributor to Art in the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 (2000), and Silversmiths to the Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808-1842 (2007), as well as lead author of The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann (2011).