An American Silver and Mixed Metal Tea Caddy, Tiffany & Co., New York, 1877–1891

Under the design leadership of Edward C. Moore, Tiffany & Co. produced some of its most innovative and inventive silver. As interest in Japanism swept the United States and Europe in the wake of trade ports opening with Japan in 1854, Moore and his team sought to replicate the techniques of their mixed-metal designs. The firms technical manuals reveal endless experimentation to master the Japanese alloys found on the present caddy, such as mokume-gane- a woodgrain pattern created by soldered layers of gold, silver and copper alloys; shakudō- a bluish-black alloy of copper and gold; and shibuichi- a brownish-black copper alloy.

Tiffany & Co. first introduced their mokume works at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, winning them the grand prize and making them an international sensation. They continued to produce Japanese-inspired designs featuring innovative alloys for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. The present lot bears French import marks, suggesting it could have been brought to Paris for one of these fairs.

This caddy is remarkable for its large scale mokume panels, as Tiffany typically employed this process in smaller areas such as on butterfly wings and gourds. A nearly identical tea caddy, numbered 4921-9630, was sold at Christie's New York, 24 January 2020, lot 428, for $50,000. For a similar rectangular shaped vase fully applied with mokume panels at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, illustrated by the Tiffany & Co. archives, see M. Masinter, Tiffany’s Mastery of Mokume Paris 1889, Master of Arts in the History of Decorative Arts, The Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Parsons School of Design, 1991, figs. 25 and 26.