Tiffany Rules as Gilded Age Splendor Returns to the Met

A sterling swan, 3,000 ounces of candelabra, and plug your foes first-class with a Tiffany pistol.

S eeing a Tiffany & Co. robin’s-egg-blue box makes me smile. Getting one — with a Tiffany product inside, given to me — makes my heart go pitter pat. I sing “Moon River” as I carefully unbox. Tiffany pioneered luxury shopping in America and developed line upon line of luxury goods. It’s still a classy place. No blue boxes in the Metropolitan Museum’s Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co., I’m sorry to say, but I left happy after a long visit to this sumptuous show. Moore (1827–1891) was an accomplished silversmith, Tiffany’s head of design, and an astute, voracious collector. The art’s lovely and plentiful, and the scholarship is rich.

How could it not be? Dancing nymphs come cast and chased. Orientalist tea sets evoke secrets swapped in Gilded Age parlors. The Bryant Vase, inspired by ancient Greek art, is no flowerpot. Sublime and imposing, it would have found a fitting perch in the Parthenon. At a hefty 452 ounces, it would have sunk the Argos. There’s Venetian glass, Japanese kimonos, and pistols with Tiffany grips, embossed and nielloed for those who like to murder in high style.

It’s intense, too. Collecting Inspiration has three core themes covered via 180 or so objects. First, it displays and interprets masterpieces in Tiffany silver produced under Moore’s direction. In large measure, it’s a Gilded Age silver show and over the top in the best way possible. Moore is the antidote to minimalism. Shakers will shake, Quakers will quake. Acolytes of “less is more,” prepare to be struck dumb. Moore is the master of “more is more.”

Second, it’s the story of Moore’s eye as a collector. From the 1850s until his death, he collected thousands of objects, mostly European and ancient glass but also ancient Greek pots and decorative arts of the Islamic world and Asia. After Moore died, these came to the Met along with his immense library.

Moore’s tastes and travels were international. No style, traditional or avant-garde, escaped him. His collection and aesthetic inspired Tiffany’s designs. American Orientalism and Japonism had many pioneers, but Moore was among the most discerning and influential. And these two uber-styles were textured and varied. Tiffany ledgers, plumbed by the Met’s curators, record the manufacture of works called Mesopotamia and Moresque, Pompeian and Palm, Bamboo and Bacchanal. None called Debauch, alas, but why be blunt?

Third, Moore was a master promoter of art education focusing on what was once called applied arts but that I call “anything practical made aesthetically pleasing.” His students were, first and foremost, his Tiffany staff, but Tiffany set the standard for American design at its best. Moore’s collection at the Met had a large gallery to itself until 1942. It made for a tutorial on what inspired High Victorian style in the decorative arts and was itself inspired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Much of the silver on view was used to dine in resplendence, but all of it is to be seen as sculpture, so banish those of us who polish it, whether or not it’s granny’s kind of stuff, or, here and there, it’s ostentation. This is high art.

Moore’s father was a silversmith in New York, where silver goods had been produced since the mid 1600s in small shops, typically by a single maker and an apprentice who was his son. Eventually, greater wealth made for more demand and more elaborate products. By 1850, Edward was working as Papa Moore’s partner in a firm that, with the help of more than 20 workers, specialized in a Rococo Revival style dense with minute chasing and packed motifs from nature.

Roughly at the same time, Charles Louis Tiffany (1812–1902) was growing a luxury-goods shop retailing jewelry, European glass and porcelain, goods from China and Japan, and fancy silver supplied by outside makers. Tiffany & Co. soon became the Moore firm’s sole retailer. Both expanded and prospered. By the 1860s, Tiffany absorbed the Moore business. Edward was working for Tiffany, leading the design and manufacturing departments that employed hundreds. He hired the best and produced thousands of pieces of silver, among them masterpieces.

I like juvenilia, so I was glad to see a cup and a pitcher that Moore made in 1853. He knew early how to balance high-relief flowers and smooth, undecorated ground, and also how to align decoration, form, and function. The two objects are pretty and small — modest. Only a few feet away is the Bryant Vase from 1876, magnificent and a visual opus, with medallions designed by Saint-Gaudens that show moments in William Cullen Bryant’s life. It created a sensation at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. In the same small space are ancient mosaic fragments and Greek and Roman glass objects that Moore collected.

It’s jarring, at first — so many things, so many media, so many looks, and so great a span of time. The space presents Moore as an antiquarian, which I suppose needed to be established. What it also establishes is that Moore was a sponge of not only styles but also techniques. Moore and his staff constantly asked “How did they make this?” and they often incorporated ancient shapes in their designs.

Tiffany silver is a constant in Collecting Inspiration, but it’s an exhibition of Moore’s collection, too. So big a haul, and so sundry, transformed the fledgling Met. I loved the variety. Labels for the dozen or so Greek vases on view were a collaboration between the American silver curator and the Met’s specialist in ancient ceramics. Each label treats the object for what it is — art of Ancient Greece — and for what it meant to Moore as a designer always thinking of Tiffany’s next big thing.

One striking object is a South Italian calyx, or mixing bowl, from around 325 b.c. A large grape vine with leaves and clusters of grapes wreathes its upper body. An egg pattern decorates its overhanging lip. The rest of the pot is a glossy black. In the Met’s Greek galleries, it wouldn’t shine among a hundred other vases. Here, it’s a star, and an intriguing one.

Japonism came to America in the 1870s, and Moore and Tiffany were fast on the case. Designs are delicate, asymmetrical, and dreamy. Spiders, bamboo shoots, dragonflies, beetles, butterflies, and tiny fish abound. Moore and his team mixed metals to make painterly, narrative surfaces. Copper, brass, and gold motifs, often tinted in pastel colors, were set against hammered silver backdrops to evoke ponds. The objects — mostly small things like pitchers, trays, teapots, vases, and necklaces — are nature abstracted

These things are creatures of Gilded Age America. No surface goes undecorated. A tray from around 1880 is made from silver, copper, brass, a gold and copper alloy, and a copper-platinum-gold alloy. Its background is elaborated hammered. There’s a moon, clouds, a pond, dragonflies, and a big, lively frog. I’d call it busy.

What I wouldn’t call it is muscular, and big, brash, and muscular is what Americans liked. Americans loved presentation silver vases, cups, and trays, entirely unpractical since they’re nearly the size of tanks. But what better way to say “thank you” than the vase that the congregation of the Emanu-El synagogue in New York gave in 1888 to Lewis May after his 25 years as president? It’s positively and almost literally architectural, modeled as it was after both the synagogue itself, then on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, and the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Packed with the iconography of the Old Testament, it’s Gilded Age style at its peak. Had Tiffany’s been around, God would have said “no” to stone and hired Moore’s team to do something snazzy.

Moore loved Islamic art and style. A big, long gallery displays Tiffany silver in center cases, with Persian, Near Eastern, and Moorish art that Moore collected lining the space. Brass trays, ceramics, and textiles show some of Moore’s inspirations.

Visitors to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia saw a majestic gilded-silver swan set on a pedestal, floating on a mirrored, water-like surface. It was the premiere of the Swan Centerpiece, on view here. Tiffany craftsmen hammered the body from a single, thick sheet of silver. Then, masters of repoussé — chasing from inside — created feathers, scrolls, zigzags, and circles. Jewel-like designs and beads decorate the swan’s chest, neck, and legs. Its silver head and feet were separately cast and applied with tiny hammers and picks.

Tiffany’s ledgers called it Oriental and Indian, but I call it one shiny chunk of faux poultry. While it’s indebted to Meissen’s Swan Service from around 1740, it’s sybaritic enough and one of the masterpieces of American Orientalism.

Tiffany was never an all-out department store. Shoppers would, then and now, look in vain for a mattress department. The business, though, started as a stationery and gift shop and always sold a range of high-end wares, among them firearms. It worked the closest and longest with Smith & Wesson, doing a bespoke business in the 1880s and ’90s. If you were among “the Four Hundred” in New York’s high society, why settle for a hard rubber grip when you could have 92.5 silver on your .44 caliber?

Asymmetrically applied salamanders adorn one pistol, for an O.K. Corral shoot-out à la Japonism. Another has graceful, overlapping leafy scrolls in black niello, inspired by design in the Caucasus, where no one leaves home unarmed. A gun designed for railroad magnate Jay Gould is a nice touch. A love cup sits next to the pistols, suggesting that passion and crimes of passion are stops along the road to perdition.

The exhibition is nicely paced and perfectly designed. As I’ve often noted, the Met always opts for the primacy of the art on view. Its exhibition designers aren’t hunnish. There’s no quest for control. As in many Met exhibitions, though, Collecting Inspiration has too many objects in it. It’s a committee show, as are many, since we’re in an age of inclusion and belonging and every voice needs to be not only heard but worshipped. An edit would’ve helped. The deep lavender wall color, called “Misty Memories,” was well chosen. It has a touch of gray and helps deliver us to a distant past.

We can never have too much Tiffany silver, though, and in Collecting Inspiration, the Met displays the best. That’s what matters most. Tiffany & Co. was the temple of high-establishment taste in the Gilded Age in New York, and that means its patrons were among the movers and shakers. There’s more than a little American history in the show.

In 1869, members of the Union League Club presented the cartoonist and satirist Thomas Nast with a splendid vase recognizing his essential work in swaying public opinion during the Civil War. On each side of the vase, a sculpted putto slays a dragon — doubling as a handle — called “the Secession monster.” The putto’s weapon is a stylus, which was Nast’s weapon as an artist. Near it is a sugar bowl from 1863 shaped like the Monitor, the Union ironclad warship. Over and over, we see big names from the era, among them not only Nast, William Cullen Bryant, and Jay Gould but also Vanderbilt, Morgan, Flagler, Frelinghuysen, Havemeyer, and Ogden Goelet, the millionaire sailor.

The exhibition ends in a blast, bravura-style, with a couple of showstoppers. The Magnolia Vase, from 1893, premiered at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Made of silver, gold, and opals — all, Tiffany announced, mined in America — it touted America’s natural wealth as well as our craft acumen. Pueblo pottery inspired its shape. Chased and applied pinecones, cacti, and goldenrods saluted different parts of the country. Yes, it’s brazen. Yes, it’s flashy. It’s triumphant and transcendent. Capturing the velvety, tonal look of magnolia petals, it’s a triumph of enameling, too. It took 15 Tiffany craftsmen two years to make it.

Finally, a pair of candelabras made in 1884 dazzle the viewer. They’re the most dazzling works of silver sculpture made in the Gilded Age, in America, certainly, but possibly in the English-speaking world. They weigh a tad over 3,000 ounces, not quite what Muhammad Ali weighed, but they’re powerhouse big. They’re nearly beyond the scope of human imagination, but there they are.

I love the catalogue, which has deep, readable essays and great photography. The candelabra are very, very important, but the Met, in the book, minimizes them, strange to say. They get one illustration and a mere mention. Why? The Met does this all the time. It trivializes what it doesn’t own. I find this uncharitable and intellectually sly. The Met was able to buy them this year in what must have been an unexpected purchase.

I would have done more with the candelabra. A shrine, for starters. The label calls their decorative scheme “manifestly non-Western,” but that’s wrong. Their dense floral and vegetal composition might owe a tiny bit to Japanese textiles, but by the 1880s this jam-packed style is American. Tiffany described the female figures on the body of the objects as Roman, and I agree. It’s Rococo Revival and Regency Revival, too. American artists are great amalgamators. They take motifs and looks here and there, combine, tweak, and reimagine, and make something uniquely American. The things don’t ooze wealth. They’re aesthetic bulldozers and the supreme flower of the Gilded Age — a fitting finale to a wonderful show.