The Magazine Antiques

By Abigail Nova  |  

The 1870s and 1880s were some of the most innovative and exciting decades in the history of the American silver industry. Postwar prosperity, the discovery of silver in the American West, and innovations in manufacturing created an ideal environment for the design and fashioning of original objects. Among the most prolific and successful silver companies in the period was the Whiting Manufacturing Company, best known today for the beautifully designed and executed Japanese-inspired silver it made between 1874 and 1890. While Tiffany and Company and the Gorham Manufacturing Company were larger, more established manufacturers, Whiting's designers were particularly original in appropriating Japanese and naturalistic motifs drawn from Japanese prints, pottery, metalwork, and textiles-as well as from Euro­pean print sources.

While the firm is widely recognized as a major American silver manu­facturer, remarkably little is known about its designers, except for its founding partner and first chief designer, William Dean Whiting (1815-1891), who retired in 1880. My research has established that Edwin Davis French, a noted bookplate designer, was an important Whiting designer for many years,¹ and I have uncovered evidence that Charles Osborne, a well-known designer for Tiffany, was also designing for Whiting in the 1880s. In addition, and of particular interest to collectors, my research revealed a method for dating Whiting silver made between 1880 and 1894.

William Dean Whiting was a silversmith who began his career as an apprentice to his uncle John Tifft at the Attleboro, Massachusetts, jewelry-manufacturing firm Draper and Tifft. With his uncle's financial back­ing, he and his cousin Albert Crandall Tifft formed Tifft and Whiting in 1840, which produced such items as gold hearts, crosses, and rings. By the 1850s they employed 150 workers and had ex­panded production to include sterling silver goods such as cups, flatware, and combs.² In need of a wholesale sales presence, Whiting established an office in New York, where he appears in the 1853-1854 city directories as a jeweler. The firm underwent several subsequent expansions³ but was liquidated in 1866 due to debts. Whiting and several partners then founded the Whit­ing Manufacturing Company later that year.⁴ By the early 1870s the firm had a steam-powered, belt-driven factory in Attleboro employing highly specialized workers, such as die makers, turners, chasers, and engravers.⁵ This early adop­tion of a factory model allowed for increased production, with the result that by 1893 Whiting was the third largest silver-manufacturing firm in the United States.⁶

After a fire destroyed the Attleboro factory in September 1875, the firm moved to New York City, combining its manufacturing operations and of­fices into one building at 692-694 Broadway at Fourth Street.⁷ Of the approximately two hundred employees in Attleboro, some forty to eighty (forty families) relocated with the firm.⁸

One of these was Edwin French, a designer and head of the engraving department at Whiting from 1869 to 1894.⁹ After French retired in 1894, he focused on designing and engraving bookplates (see Figs. 4, 6). Indeed, his success as a bookplate engraver at the end of his career (he designed more than 350 between 1894 and 1906), has largely eclipsed his long and successful career at Whiting. While no specific pieces of silver have previously been attributed to him, there is a striking relation­ship between his bookplate designs and motifs found on Whiting silver. The vase in Figure 3, for example, can be attributed to him because the lilies on it are remarkably similar to those in a bookplate of about 1893 (Fig. 4). The match safe in Figure 5 can likewise be attributed to French based on the similarity of the clover to those on the bookplate in Figure 6.

Another previously under-recognized Whiting designer is Charles Osborne, best known for his inventive designs for Tiffany and Company, but who began his career at Whiting in 1871. It has been widely assumed that after he left Whiting in 1878 Osborne worked exclusively for Tiffany, but my research revealed that he continued to design for Whiting in 1882 and 1883 and quite possibly afterwards. A number of Whiting objects from the early 1880s have obvious Osborne character­istics, notably pearling and seaweed motifs (see Fig. 9).¹⁰ One of his most accomplished designs for the firm in this period was the Goelet Schoo­ner Prize (Fig. 7), dating from 1883, several years after he supposedly left the firm.¹¹ Osborne's papers indicate that he was commissioned to make a number of medals unconnected with Tiffany, supporting the credibility of his designing for Whiting while employed by Tiffany.¹²

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