AN IMPORTANT SILVER-MOUNTED AND STONE-SET EBONYVIKING BOWL

Details
AN IMPORTANT SILVER-MOUNTED AND STONE-SET EBONYVIKING BOWL
MAKER'S MARK OF TIFFANY & CO., NEW YORK, 1902

Tapering oval, the sides applied with elaborate Viking designs of scrolls, strapwork, flowerheads and grotesques masks, with roundels chased with geometric design and centering cabochon black opals, with bands above and below of continuous chevrons and scrolls, applied again on sides and ends with beads and scrollwork terminating in scroll supports and headed by bifurcated scrolls, the ends forming the handle mounts, chased and applied with further strapwork and chevrons, marked on base, 15401/5664--length of base 18in.

Lot Essay

Tiffany's pattern book describes this bowl as "Viking Punch Bowl," recorded on November 19, 1902

Paulding Farnham designed a small group of stone-set objects in the Viking style between 1893 and 1902. A three-piece coffee service set with zircons and hessonites was made for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo of 1901 and is now in the Newark Museum. This coffee service and a related vase set with opals, now at the Brooklyn Museum, are illustrated in Janet Zapata, "The Rediscovery of Paluding Farnham, Tiffany's Designer Extraordinairre," Antiques, April 1991, plates X and XII, pp. 726-727. A Viking vase set with garnets and tourmalines was sold in these Rooms, January 17, 1992, lot 13.

Some of the finest of Farnham's Viking designs were of wood or base metals and not predominantly silver. The most famous of these is the iron and silver punch bowl made for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated in 19th Century America, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970, illus. fig. 259. A viking love-cup at the Metropolitan Museum is panelled in burrwood inlaid with mother of pearl.