Vase

Tiffany & Co.

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

To celebrate the distinctive beauty of Native American art, Tiffany & Co.’s gifted designer G. Paulding Farnham created three highly unusual silver vessels for the firm’s grand prize-winning display at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The present vase is inspired by the design of Navajo pottery, its hand-raised silver body ornamented with semi-precious stones sourced in America: turquoise-colored amazonite and bluish opals, as well as hundreds of freshwater pearls embedded in the "corn-cob" handles. Tiffany & Co. also exhibted the vase the following year at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition. Paulding Farnham was one of Tiffany & Co.’s most talented designers of both jewelry and silver. He began an apprenticeship around 1878, was selected serve as assitant to the firm's artistic director Edward C. Moore in about 1885, and went on to become the firm’s head jewelry designer in 1891. Farnham continued to win gold medals at international fairs until departing the firm in 1904.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art