Magnificent, Marvelous Martele

by Keefe, John Webster; Hough, Samuel J.; Gorham Manufacturing Company; New Orleans Museum of Art

• ISBN13: 9780894940842
• ISBN10: 0894940848
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

The Martcle line of handwrought silver in the Art Nouveau style by the Gorham Manufacturing Company is justly regarded as a major expression of that style on this side of the Artlantie Ocean. Officially introdticed at the intluential Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Martele silver was widely admired, and was awarded a Grand Prix and many gold medals. The excitement created then by the new artistie line of Martele silver has been rekindled by this premiere exhibition of nearly three hundred works from the collection of Jolie and Robert Shelton. The mammoth and highly regarded Gorham Company developed from a small rewelry manufactory founded by Jabez Gorham (1792-1869) in Providence, Rhode Island, to the world's largest producer of sterling silver wares. In the process of this growth, the company Jistinguished itself by successfully combining new technological advances in the industry with exemplary design. So successful was Gorham in the closing years of the nineteenth century that it could devote considerable time, money and expertise to create an art line of hollowware produced entirely by hand. The new line in the latest cutting-edge taste departed dramatically from Gorham's flourishing line of machine-made commercial that and hollowwares. It was named Martele, from the French verb murteler. "the hammer." The line probably never would have come into existence without the driving influence and vision of two men, Gorham's energetic chief executive. Edward Holbrook (1849-1919) and its chief designer William Christmas Codman (1839-1923). To connoisseurs of silver, Codman is justly renowned for the development of the lavish Martele line, starting with designs in 1896 and commencing a limited production in 1897.

Author Biography

John Webster Keefe is the RosaMary Foundation Curator of The Decorative Arts at the New Orleans Museum of Art, a position he has held since 1983. The author of numerous museum exhibition catalogues and articles on the decorative arts, Mr. Keefe is particularly interested in the decorative arts of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is a long-standing admirer of the richly diverse and complex international Art Nouveau style Samuel J. Hough is well-known to American collectors of American silver as an author, historian and expert on the development of the Gorham Manufacturing Corporation. He also is famous for saving the rich heritage of the Gorham archives and preserving them at the John Hay Library of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. When not chronicling the history and wares of Gorham, Mr. Hough is a distinguished antiquarian bookseller at The Owl At The Bridge in Cranston, Rhode Island

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
E. John Bullard
Acknowledgements	xi
Jolie
Robert Shelton
Curator's Foreword and Acknowledgements	xiii
John Webster Keefe
The Gorham Corporation: A Brief History	1	(12)
John Webster Keefe
Some Dates Important in Gorham History	13	(8)
Samuel J. Hough
The House of Lords: The Chasers of Martele Silver	21	(9)
Samuel J. Hough
Index to the Gorham Silver Chasers	30	(3)
Martele Silver and the Art Nouveau Style in America	33	(18)
John Webster Keefe
The Alloys of Martele Silver and Its Hallmarks	51	(5)
The Gorham Date Symbols	56	(3)
The Martele Number and Letter Codes	59	(2)
A Word to the Reader of the Catalogue	61	(2)
Martele Silver: The Catalogue	63	(446)
Samuel J. Hough
John Webster Keefe
Selected Bibliography	509	(2)
Glossary of Silver Terms	511	(6)
Index	517