Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If you were an A-list hostess planning a dinner party in 1870s New York, you might have felt that your table, and therefore your glory, would be incomplete without an armoured swan hauling a cargo of fruit. Some of your guests would probably have attended the 1871 New York premiere of Wagner’s Lohengrin, whose title character makes his entrance aboard an oversized white swan, giving the bird a place of honour in the city’s social shibboleths. And you wouldn’t have coveted just any swan, but the 2ft-long creature fashioned of sterling silver by Tiffany & Co. Costing $3,000 — roughly $90,000 today — such a triumph was within reach for the freshly enriched uppermost of the upper crust.Tiffany’s chief wizard was Edward C Moore, and the Met’s exhibition of the overwrought baubles he oversaw is more than a celebration of one silversmith’s skill or one company’s prestige, or even of Gilded Age extravagance. It’s a dive into the 19th century’s version of cultural globalism, when India, Japan, the Islamic world and an assortment of other lands supplied the elements of western taste and craft. Moore travelled widely and returned with truckloads of spectacular souvenirs: shards of Roman glass, Persian rosewater sprinklers, Turkish girdle clasps, Caucasian daggers, Japanese sake bottles and hundreds of other items that he accumulated into an encyclopedia of inspiration. His collection served as a library for Tiffany’s designers. They studied his finds and plundered them for patterns and motifs, combining the iconography of many civilisations into a style of silverwork sumptuous — OK, gaudy — enough for their demanding clientele.On Moore’s death in 1891, his collection of more than 2,000 objects and hundreds of books went to the Metropolitan Museum, and for the next five decades the pieces were shown together in a dedicated space. This first-class hodgepodge was redistributed throughout the museum only in 1942, dispersed among the specialised departments that had evolved in the interim.Now the Met has plucked Moore’s treasures back from those scattered galleries and temporarily reunited 180 of them. Viewers can move between the pieces he brought back, which at the Met are displayed in the middle of each room, and those he brought forth, which are arranged along the walls. The varied models informed dazzling hybrids, and the Met’s smart installation allows viewers to see exactly how.A lacquered Meiji-period box from Japan is encrusted with ferns and butterflies painted in powdered gold and silver, with mother-of-pearl inlay. Similar Japanese motifs — dragonflies, maple leaves, spiders, frogs and turtles — populate Tiffany trays and teapots, their copper-and-gold hues popping against the silver. But Moore did not want to churn out copies; he and the artists he supervised went back to the source. “Wings of dragonfly engraved from natural ones,” he noted on a drawing.The point of scouring the world for ideas was to fuse them into products that were, as he put it, “distinctively American and unlike anything that is produced abroad”. The big fruit swan is the apotheosis of that patriotic eclecticism. Hammered out of a single sheet of silver, it has a long, curved neck, scroll-like feathers and an elaborately beaded necklace. Visitors to Tiffany’s display at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition saw this august animal floating on a mirrored surface atop a silver pedestal. The designers began their work en plein air, sketching the fauna in Central Park, then went back to the studio to trick out their drawings with Indian, east and west Asian ornamentation.The 19th century’s exuberant eclecticism has had a bad rap in the annals of design evolution. It came to seem inauthentic and vulgar to 20th-century adepts of Modernist purity. Eventually, the whole project of borrowing acquired distasteful overtones of cultural appropriation. The Met’s show takes us back to a moment when the cutting-edge designer had the world at his fingertips. A range of rich traditions had made their way to Europe and on to America through trade and colonisation, and customers couldn’t get enough of the high-grade knock-offs.Marie Mackay asked her husband, the prodigiously moustachioed co-owner of the Comstock Lode of silver ore, John William Mackay, for a service “by the finest silversmith in the country” — Moore. It took half a ton of ore, almost two years and the labour of hundreds to produce her set of more than 1,250 pieces, which could take her guests from oysters and consommé through a fistful of courses to midnight cherry compote. The opus’s parallel function was to proclaim that the Mackays, who were born into abject poverty, could now outspend aristocrats and robber barons.Tiffany defined the distinctive “Mackay style” as an amalgam of Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Arabian elements, a mishmash that typified Moore’s creative process. On its way to the Mackays’ Paris mansion, the gear went on view at the 1878 Paris Exposition. It was the showpiece of Tiffany’s display and won a royal flush of prizes. The Met has recovered an ice cream dish bordered by a profusion of virtuosically chased flowers and resting on four folded elephant trunks.Yet not even Moore could satisfy his clients’ desire for ostentation. In an 1879 diary entry, Charles T Grosjean, Tiffany’s lead silversmith, wrote: “Mrs Mackay still expresses a desire to have a large Centre-Piece — one with a bird that will come out by moving a pedal under the table and will sing and then disappear again. ECM [Edward C Moore] does not want to make it, asserting that it is common and vulgar.” It was not every artisan who could get away with insulting customers who spent as lavishly as the Mackays.There is something simultaneously invigorating and off-putting about Moore’s deluxe excess. He had an astonishingly astute collector’s eye, and the items he swept up on his travels constitute an anthology of exquisite craftsmanship and refined design. But translated to Victorian parlours and gaslit dining rooms in New York and Paris, such ornamental opulence seems fussy and stiff, even silly. That’s the danger of juxtaposing an artist’s work with the sources of his inspiration: the anonymous originals might outshine the star. Until October 20, metmuseum.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
