ARTHUR J. STONE - FURTHER INFORMATION
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Arthur J. Stone
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Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
A LOVING CUP GIVEN TO PRESIDENT ELIOT, OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
The delay in the appearance of this, the last number of 'Handicraft', which was due to a fire at the printers, is so far fortunate that it enables us to publish photographs of the silver loving cup which was given to President Eliot of Harvard University on his seventieth birthday, by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The cup was made by a member of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Mr. Arthur Stone of Gardner, Mass. Its design is in its main outlines an enlargement of a Greek carchesium, or drinking-cup, of the early part of the fifth century B.C., now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which was selected by the committee as a model. The Greek original is one of those pieces of Greek pottery, common at that period, which imitated metal in its main outlines. It was therefore a form suitable for retranslation into metal. In enlarging it, it was of course necessary slightly to change the proportions in order to preserve the delicacy of detail of the original and also because of the different material in which it was to be executed. The silver loving-cup measures twelve inches across the handles, and is about eight inches wide at the rim and eight inches high to the top of the handles. It was found that the scheme of proportion underlying the Greek design was that division of a dimension into two parts which the Germans call “the golden section,” in which the smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. This scheme of proportion was not only preserved in the silver cup, but occurs in it more frequently than in the Greek original. Thus the two mouldings of the base are in this proportion; the height of the base and the height from the top of the base to the point of the projecting rim from which the lower end of the handles spring; the height from the bottom of the cup to the point of this rim and from here to the bottom of the inscription; the distance from the edge of the upper rim of the cup to the top of the inscription and the total width of the inscription; the height of the letters and the distance between each line of the inscription; the distance from the top of the handle to the cross-bar and from the cross-bar to the foot of the handle; the horizontal projection of each handle from the body to half the diameter of the body; all these are in this proportion. The proportion itself is a very satisfying one and we have here a very interesting exemplification of the principle that, to produce harmony, the same proportion should be repeated in different dimensions in different parts of a design.
The cup is not spun, but was beaten up by hand, the handles also were wrought from heavy bar silver and heavily soldered on to the body. The inscription was formed by punching in the letters and then inlaying with gold-wire, the wire being forced into place, shaped and flattened by punching. The letters were left in very slight relief. The punchmarks of the lettering inside the cup were faced off until they hardly show. As will be seen, the inscription forms a band about the body of the cup. In the center of one side is the college shield. This was embossed and engraved, and the background filled with gold, using gold-leaf. The filling is flush with the surface of the shield. A branch of laurel and a branch of oak, one on each side of the shield, were snarled up from the back and chased in relief, the laurel fruit and acorns being made of gold inlay. The finish of the cup was purposely kept somewhat dull and the effect of the hammer-marks, hardly seen, gives to the surface the scintillation which is so beautiful in old Elizabethan silverware.
The inscription reads as follows: “ Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University,” and on the opposite side of the college shield, “ From the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, March 20, 1904": on the other side of the cup, “In grateful Acknowledgment of his Devotion to the University for thirty-five years and of his Passion for Justice for Progress and for Truth.”
Source: Handicraft - March 1904
Trev.
The delay in the appearance of this, the last number of 'Handicraft', which was due to a fire at the printers, is so far fortunate that it enables us to publish photographs of the silver loving cup which was given to President Eliot of Harvard University on his seventieth birthday, by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The cup was made by a member of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Mr. Arthur Stone of Gardner, Mass. Its design is in its main outlines an enlargement of a Greek carchesium, or drinking-cup, of the early part of the fifth century B.C., now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which was selected by the committee as a model. The Greek original is one of those pieces of Greek pottery, common at that period, which imitated metal in its main outlines. It was therefore a form suitable for retranslation into metal. In enlarging it, it was of course necessary slightly to change the proportions in order to preserve the delicacy of detail of the original and also because of the different material in which it was to be executed. The silver loving-cup measures twelve inches across the handles, and is about eight inches wide at the rim and eight inches high to the top of the handles. It was found that the scheme of proportion underlying the Greek design was that division of a dimension into two parts which the Germans call “the golden section,” in which the smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. This scheme of proportion was not only preserved in the silver cup, but occurs in it more frequently than in the Greek original. Thus the two mouldings of the base are in this proportion; the height of the base and the height from the top of the base to the point of the projecting rim from which the lower end of the handles spring; the height from the bottom of the cup to the point of this rim and from here to the bottom of the inscription; the distance from the edge of the upper rim of the cup to the top of the inscription and the total width of the inscription; the height of the letters and the distance between each line of the inscription; the distance from the top of the handle to the cross-bar and from the cross-bar to the foot of the handle; the horizontal projection of each handle from the body to half the diameter of the body; all these are in this proportion. The proportion itself is a very satisfying one and we have here a very interesting exemplification of the principle that, to produce harmony, the same proportion should be repeated in different dimensions in different parts of a design.
The cup is not spun, but was beaten up by hand, the handles also were wrought from heavy bar silver and heavily soldered on to the body. The inscription was formed by punching in the letters and then inlaying with gold-wire, the wire being forced into place, shaped and flattened by punching. The letters were left in very slight relief. The punchmarks of the lettering inside the cup were faced off until they hardly show. As will be seen, the inscription forms a band about the body of the cup. In the center of one side is the college shield. This was embossed and engraved, and the background filled with gold, using gold-leaf. The filling is flush with the surface of the shield. A branch of laurel and a branch of oak, one on each side of the shield, were snarled up from the back and chased in relief, the laurel fruit and acorns being made of gold inlay. The finish of the cup was purposely kept somewhat dull and the effect of the hammer-marks, hardly seen, gives to the surface the scintillation which is so beautiful in old Elizabethan silverware.
The inscription reads as follows: “ Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University,” and on the opposite side of the college shield, “ From the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, March 20, 1904": on the other side of the cup, “In grateful Acknowledgment of his Devotion to the University for thirty-five years and of his Passion for Justice for Progress and for Truth.”
Source: Handicraft - March 1904
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
SUPERB ECCLESIASTICAL WORK IN GOLD AND SILVER
By Irene Sargent, Litt. M. (Professor of the History of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N. Y.)
Recent Specimens from the Workshop of the Eminent Massachusetts Metalsmith, Arthur J. Stone.
Magnificent Ciborium-Monstrance for Boston Church.
Some years ago, the jewelry and metalworking industries, particularly the workers in the precious metals, were tremendously interested in a wonderful gold and jeweled chalice, wrought for Trinity Church, Boston, in memory of the lamented artist and writer, Mrs. Sarah Whitman. This was the work of the eminent Massachusetts metalsmith, Arthur J. Stone, but even that lovely work of this master craftsman in gold and silver has now been surpassed, certainly in delicacy and elaboration, in a ciborium-monstrance, now a treasure of the Lady Chapel of the Church of the Advent, Boston, and the product of the Stone workshop at Gardner. This latest masterpiece provides the major topic and principal illustrations of this article.
In view of the widely diffused fame of the two ecclesiastical pieces just mentioned, as also of the loving cup given by the Factulty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University to President Eliot, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, it might seem superfluous in this place to make allusion to the career of the metalsmith, their author, but, at least, one may emphasize his seven years' apprenticeship in his native city, Sheffield, England; his enthusiastic study, as a boy, of both music and literature, pursued as far as permitted by limited time and means; his valuable experience as a craftsman at Edinburgh; his skill as a designer formed by adequate art courses in his native country, and his refined taste self-developed by research in libraries and by the consequent broad acquaintance with historical examples of his craft. Nor is it untimely to repeat an opinion expressed the current year by a critic in the New York Times, at the moment of an exhibition at the Little Gallery, in that city, when he estimated Mr. Stone as the first of living silversmiths. And while this opinion may appear to be a strong assertion, since technicians are wont to be judged from varying points of view—such as those of nationality and school—it will serve in spite of any personal preferences or prejudices, to rank this craftsman among the most distinguished men of his calling, wherever existing, and also to attract to his work the interest of many persons deprived of expert knowledge of his special field of artistic labor. Moreover, it would seem reasonable that, at least, the Ciborium-Monstrance of our illustrations, by its sole and rare perfection of workmanship, might stand as the latest and highest example of an historical series beginning with the crude yet effective methods of the makers of the Lombard Crown and the insignia of Charlemagne, including the Byzantine-German silver altar-front of Saint Ambrose in Milan and the resplendent Pala d' Oro or reredos at Saint Mark's, Venice, thence passing to the cups and the figure-work, in both noble metals, of the renowned sixteenth century Florentine master, Benvenuto Cellini—all of these being survivals out of the chaos of either governmental or private vicissitudes of fortune and causing the student-observer to marvel that they have so long evaded the melting-pot, that Moloch fatal to masterpieces of monetary value; causing him also to thank God that the exquisite modern work, contact with which is restricted to the consecrated hand of the priest alone, is beyond a possibility of danger, protected from the desecrating and bestial intrusion of the spiked helmet.
In presenting the illustrations of the Ciborium- or Pyx-Monstrance, it is important briefly to explain the service to which this form of sacred vessel is consecrated in the Roman and in the stricter branch of the Anglican Communion. The first of these three specially used words was originally applied to the canopy erected over the high altar in certain early churches and was so called because of its resemblance to the calyx and seed-pod of the Egyptian lotus-flower. It was later transferred to the receptacle for the consecrated wafer or Host, and its linguistic connection with the Latin cibus, food, became intensely significant in the sense of spiritual sustenance, although the food at first indicated was the seed or bean which was a staple article of consumption of the people of the Nile Valley.
The second name, derived from the Greek, has as its simple equivalent the English word "box"; but, by extension of meaning, it was given to the State Treasury at Athens and throughout the literature of our own mother-tongue it has held the savor of sanctity, as may be realized by reference to the great dictionary of the Oxford scholar, Murray, who, in a long sequence of authors, quotes Mrs. Browning in her allusion to "the pure pyx of love." In the myths of certain Greek deities, as, for example, those of Apollo and Psyche—highest of intellectual and mystical types-—a pyx is the guardian of secrets awful in import. Therefore, it was natural that when Christianity superseded paganism, the Greek word was retained, although it was glorified by a new meaning, just as the figures of the Saviour were interpreted by early Christian Mosaicists from that of Hermes, guardian of flocks, and from that of Amphion, who according to the significant legend, by the rhythmical chords of his lyre drew the world under the rule of law and order. As a last comment upon the word "pyx," it is to be noted that while by the earlier English liturgical writers it appears to be used interchangeably with the term "ciborium," to designate the receptacle of consecrated wafers, it is, at the present time, more especially applied to the small gold or silver box containing the Eucharist or communion carried by the visiting priest to the dwellings of his parishioners lying sick.
The third and last of the words, "monstrance," is the name accepted for a vessel quite distinct from the pyx, ritualistic in purpose, essential to public worship, and so constructed as to display the Body of Christ, that is, the consecrated wafer, to the congregation kneeling in adoration, as it is raised on high in the hand of the celebrant priest; this moment being the most solemn of the ritual: the altar-bell announcing that the miracle of Transubstantiation has been accomplished, and, often in European towns, the bells in the church-towers proclaiming the consummation abroad to the people. The monstrance appears in its most familiar form in the widely-known mural painting by Raphael in the Vatican, which shows the assembly of the Church Militant, gathered about an altar, with the greatest of Catholic philosophers, Saint Thomas Aquinas, pointing to the vessel, as a symbol of the principal doctrine of the Church; while, enthroned in the clouds above, sit the Christ, the Virgin, and John the Forerunner, presiding over the Church Triumphant. In this instance, as upon most modern altars, the monstrance has the form of a simple gold candlestick topped by a circular rim surrounded by rays, the enclosed space being filled with a crystal through which is seen the opaque white of the wafer. And if such be the original and authentic form of this ecclesiastical vessel, the intention of the designer of the Ciborium or Pyx-Monstrance of our illustrations would seem clearly to indicate by structural line and by emphasis of detail the symbolism of the two elements of the Mass: the Sacrifice and the Sacrament; to offer to the mind of the worshiper the idea of a Holy Treasure guarded from profane contact and to present to his eye a Visible Divine Presence which should compel ecstasy and afford a foretaste of Heaven.
Considered purely as a work of art, the exquisite object stands aloof from all that is modern in the depreciatory sense of that term. It is free from the indefinite, penetrating element of insincerity and vanity which, too often guiding the work of both hand and brain today, is actually felt by the sensitive, yet cannot be explained through the inflexible medium of words. It would, perhaps, be better to say that the Ciborium in design and execution expresses the Gothic ideals: the fervent love of the beautiful in line and color, the care for the adaptation of part to part, that is, the feeling for proportion, above all, the patience and skill in labor which seek no material reward. It has been firmly held by the craftsman, as well as by the architect, within the limits of artistic tradition, but, at the same time, it is vitally individual. Once seen, it remains in the memory with the supreme treasures of certain Old World sacristies; such as the Reliquary of the Chapel of the Holy Blood at Bruges; only, when subjected to such comparison, it is felt to have over its similars advantages which could not have been possessed by any work of the Middle Ages. It was designed out of a wide survey of centuries of artistic production rendered accessible through schools, technical books and travel. It was materially wrought by finer tools and more perfect methods than were known to the metalsmiths of former periods.
When placed in the Church of the Advent, Boston, at Eastertide of 1909, it awakened much interest in church circles throughout the United States, not alone because of its wonderful beauty and richness, but also owing to the distinction of its architect, Mr. Cleveland, associated with Messieurs Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, the leading American exponents of Gothic, and equally owing to the name of its maker, Arthur Stone, whose reputation, established many years before in England, had extended to the centers of wealth and culture in his adopted country, many of which possessed examples of his work. The completion of the Ciborium was noted at length by the press of the town of Gardner, Mass., the place of Mr. Stone's residence, which he had chosen by preference and which he has always maintained because of his marriage with a prominent lady of the community, who is not without skill in her husband's craft and whose talent for organization and the direction of labor and affairs has contributed inestimably to the efficiency of his workshop.
The principal article locally published regarding the Ciborium, was. a detailed description which, afterward copied by the Boston press and in various periodicals, appears to be the source of information from which all succeeding references to the work have been drawn. This article presents plainly numerous valuable facts and contains but one statement which might be modified and that one only when considered to be of general application, rather than restricted to the instance in point. It concerns the distinction therein made between the two parts of the altar-vessel described; noting that the wafers before their consecration are reserved in the first mentioned receptacle, while, as its name implies, the second protects and displays the consecrated Host. But, as one may find by reference to the great dictionary of Littre in the French language and to that of Tommaseo-Bellini in the Italian, the accepted use of the Ciborium is to contain the Element in which transubstantiation has already been accomplished by the prayer of the priest: a discrepancy which is easily explained when one remembers that the two vessels—the Sacramental and the Sacrificial—are rarely united in a single body, as in the exquisite example of our discussion.
This is certainly a Sacrament-House, as religiously conceived and wrought as the greater one in stone of Adam Krafft in the Church of Saint Laurence at Nurnberg, the hard, stubborn material of which is said to have softened at the prayer of the master craftsman, until he had given it a lace-like delicacy and then to have resumed the hardness which has assured its permanence. That entrancing work is treasured by critics as one of the final, most florid and imaginative expressions of the Gothic, before the influence of Luther, like a killing frost, withered the ecclesiastical art of Germany, except that of music which alone remained to satisfy the longing for beauty which is inseparable from the impulse to adore and worship. But while the masterpiece of Krafft developed in a yet sympathetic environment, the Ciborium of the Advent took form more than four hundred years later, in the New World, without artistic traditions and out of a society which, before the war that is now waging, materialism was believed to have expelled spirituality. Still, that imponderable, ethereal quality exhales from this modern Sacrament-House, the miniature proportions of which are so harmoniously kept in scale that the effect of the structure is august; the brilliancy of the gold and jewels recalling the Vision of Saint John and the beholder of its loveliness being inspired to articulate the words of the ritual: Holy! Holy! Holy! And while the vessel is eloquent of its sacred use, it cannot remain silent concerning its makers, testifying to their purity of inspiration and purpose, as a child noble in mind and bearing glorifies his lineage. From the same studio as the Ciborium issued that convincing volume, "The Gothic Quest," of Ralph Adams Cram, upon whom has fallen the mantle of the mediaeval builders and within a New England workshop, austere, scrupulously swept and garnished, ordered as if by a master of rhythm, the drawing of the architect took on the third dimension and rose from the bench ready to receive the Corporeal Presence of the Deity.
But now so far afield from the commonplace of fact, one must return to give the dimensions of the Ciborium and to indicate the character and
arrangement of its ornament, as they are recorded in the already-mentioned descriptive article. The height of the object is fifteen and one-half inches and its weight eighty-five Troy ounces, with its substance wholly of gold— eighteen karat for the structural parts and twenty for much of the overlaid ornament; the accompanying jewels being sixty-eight diamonds, ranging from several of considerable size to tiny, spark-like gems set as the stamens of passion-flowers and in the hair of the standing angels, together with large faceted amethysts and a single superb garnet, the two last-named species of precious stones having each the color symbolic of sacrifice and atonement, since from the Roman Imperial times down to the great period of English literature confusion is to be noted in the distinctions made by writers between deep red and purple—even the poet Gray using the latter color-adjective, instead of a word meaning rosy or blushing, when alluding to the season of spring.
Referring once more to the original description, one finds the style of the composition indicated as "late Venetian Gothic," a statement which, perhaps, might have been omitted, since little that is strictly and solely typical of the place and period named is apparent in the work, unless it be luxuriance of detail, which was, however, more characteristic of Venice in the late Renaissance than during the prevalence of Gothic. Again the hexagonal dome, with the crockets climbing its ribs, gests a Northern, rather than a Byzantine origin; the cusped arches of the canopies above the heads of the angels might be early Tuscan, suggested by originals in Niccola's Pulpit at Pisa—the first monument of Italian sculpture—while the cross surmounting the whole has the proportions of the Latin type, which symbolizes the Atonement, instead of the Greek form with equal arms (signifying broadly the Christian Faith), a modification of which appears in repeats around the drum or base of the dome. One detail, however, strongly reminiscent of Venice, resides in the branches of foliage, treated in very distinct leaflets and pointing sharply upward over the concave shells which separate the canopies: this treatment resembling the ornament which serves to frame certain windows in the old, populous parish of San Zaccaria and certain others, overlooking narrow canals through which the observer shoots all too rapidly, and having once passed, with difficulty locates the fugitive treasures in the tangled maze of waterways.
Continuing one by one and indefinitely, one might select beautiful features of the Ciborium for comment and classification. But to enjoy the work more fully than by this means, it is necessary only to seize the symbolism of the passion-vine, the Crucifix, the instruments of torture, the angel-and-animal forms of the Four Evangelists and then to absorb one's self in the satisfying beauty of the design and the workmanship. And it is pleasurable to retrace in thought the evolution of the labor from its inception in the working drawings of the architect, now in the possession of Mr. Stone, through the plaster-casts of the sculptor Kirchmayer to the completed object which, in its present environment, seems imperishable. And deeper and deeper becomes the impression made by the skill of execution: the work of the chisel and of the multitude of delicate tools bewildering to the inexperienced, the soldered "mounts" so securely and precisely placed, the intricate patterns spread over the standard and the body of the Ciborium, as a luxuriant growth of foliage and flowers mantles a wall.
As one observes and examines, the conviction grows almost to a certainty that skill of hand is a Divine possession, that musicians, painters, and artificers like Mr. Stone, who command it to a degree almost inconceivable, are more to be envied than great theorists who formulate truths however valuable, but who are powerless to make appeal to our ear, our eyes, our emotions, since, after all is said, the gratification of the senses is the first care of the human being, whether he be savage or yet saturate with civilization.
To the reader, denied the sight of the actual object, it may be only just to quote fragments from the detailed description, which he may consult as he follows in our illustration the form of the Ciborium, from the inscription in beautiful uncial letters at the base, upward along the chalice-like stem of the vessel to the knop or bulb adapted to the grasp of the hand, then to the body proper, with above the monstrance protected by its angel guardians that support the dome surmounted by the Cross.
The fragmentary quotations, arranged in correct sequence and omissions being made in order to conserve space, stand as follows:
"The structure of the vessel is hexagonal, the base mounting in contracting concave curves to the knop and the latter forming a standard for a six-sided turreted box—the ciborium or pyx—from the center of the low cover of which, again hexagonal, rises the disc of the monstrance with its watch-like crystals containing the lunetts to hold firmly and away from the protecting medium the consecrated wafer. The monstrance is covered by a canopy, the supports of which spring from the cover of the ciborium and are in reality minute architectural piers with a podium or base, on which stand angels with folded draperies and one knee advanced, recalling Greek caryatides. These figures have outstretched wings, tip touching tip, and above the head of each is a domed tabernacle elaborately chiseled with leafage and set with a diamond; the space between each two tabernacles being occupied by shell-formed arches, the concave flutes of which center in cherubs' heads, while tall pinnacles flank the arches and terminate in the fleur-de-lis so familiar to all students of Gothic. The pinnacles in their turn lead the eye upward along the proportionately tall drum of the dome to its hexagonal cap which is accented along its ribs with crockets of foliage; the foliage finally forming at the summit of the dome a base for the Cross studded with diamonds."
If the reader will turn now from the plates here presented of the Ciborium, he will observe that in other ecclesiastical pieces by Mr. Stone this work finds worthy, if less elaborate, companions. Prominent among these is the magnificent cross executed for the Chapel of Saint Andrew, St. James' Church, Chicago. In this example the virile structural form is neither weakened nor deadened by the rich ornamentation. Its design issued from the brain of a student conversant with his theme and exceptionally sympathetic; since the elements composing it have been gathered from widely-separated periods and schools of art and then fused together into an organic whole, with no trace left of what might be termed the articulations or seams. Therefore, the style must be indicated as mediaeval in a broad sense, as it includes details easily recognized as Gothic, Lombardic and Byzantine; while the materials are such as would have been used in association by the decorative artists of Constantinople, who were supreme in their field from the sixth to the twelfth century, during which very considerable lapse of time they sent equally their works and their pupils westward to embellish the rapidly-multiplying churches of Europe.
As is plainly evident in our illustration, the effect made by this Cross is that of a piece of sculpture, for which the pierced work of the base and the buttresses with their crocketed pinnacles are quite as responsible as are the ivory reliefs accentuating the figure of a Greek cross, which is apparently superposed on the long vertical arm of the Latin symbol; this vertical slightly altering the accepted proportions to a greater slenderness very agreeable to the eye and saved from any suspicion of instability by the elaboration of the base. The colors of the materials (which are ebony, silver, ivory and gold) concur in a rich tranquil harmony appropriate to the subdued light of a sanctuary: while the details into which these materials are wrought offer an interesting and varied field for study.
The subject of historic ornament, never narrow nor dull, becomes most alluring when it opens the mediaeval world, suggesting the currents and movements that swept through it, the wanderings of the barbarians, and the races which then entered into the bitter struggles between Church and State. And all these indications, for one able to read them, are present in the combinations of Motifs offered in this lovely Altar Cross; constituting as it were, a code concealing a significant message. As the eye of the observer sweep's upward from the base it is arrested by the effective letters of the inscription, which, usually called uncial from their hooked or claw-like forms, are modifications of the type created by the artist-monks of Charlemagne after the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin had taught the Emperor to read and when the latter's zeal for learning was such that he caused reliquaries, made froin precious metals and shaped like initial letters, to be sent to religious communities throughout his dominions, there to be copied into Psalters, Gospels and Hour-Books. Above the inscription the rope-pattern, so effective in silver, is used quite emphatically to divide the sections of the standard, and this motif, occurring in Saint Michael's Pavia, and in other treasure-houses of Lombardic art, is said to be derived from the cordage of the Viking boat. Could there well be two more mutually hostile memories brought into each other's presence than those of Charlemagne and the Lombards? And could there be a more harmonious result? Again, within the sections one finds a maze of motifs in pierced work, largely barbarous Roman or Romanesque, like the ornament of old churches in Southern Italy, such as that of a famous portal of Molfetta—now, alas! injured by Austrian bombs—while higher, on the long vertical, there appear, as has been said gleaming surface of the central plaque, whose background is silver into which are set gold letters of modified Greek form: the initials and the finals of "Jesous Christos," and the entire Greek word "Nika" (conquers) in allusion to the Easter Triumph previously, Northern Gothic characteristics. Another change occurs in the ivory relief carvings wrought in the delicate Byzantine manner by Mr. Kirchmayer, which, framed in gold, define the superposed Greek cross. These reliefs, representing the great events in the history of Christ, emphasizes the flat, over Death and the Tomb. Workmanship in metal more beautiful than this cannot be easily imagined and if the piece shall survive accident and ravage, its claim to place Mr. Stone, as also the carver and the designer, among the immortals of their crafts will not be unsubstantial.
Another illustration—the covers of an altar-book—shows the delicate figure-work of Mr. Stone on flat bands of silver which divide the rectangular space covered with red Morocco into, four panels, medallions in very low relief occurring at the corners and in the center: those on the front representing the crucifixion and adoring angels; those on the reverse side being the Agnus Dei or Lamb with banner and the symbols of the Four Evangelists. Anatomy, muscular action and drapery are here rendered with the utmost refinement and, it would almost seem, with fairy tools. And the source of such skill was the training received through English apprenticeship and in British schools, as is proven by a small plaque of copper hanging in Mr. Stone's studio— an examination piece—on which are modeled in the same refined low relief, in proportions which would do honor to a Donatello, a conventional Italian Renaissance ornament and a spray of natural flowers rivaling the magic power of Rene Lalique.
A single one of our illustrations represents a secular piece, the dignity of which permits its display among objects of churchly service. It shows the chaste outlines of the memorial offered to President Eliot, of Harvard, by the donors and on the occasion mentioned at the beginning of the present article. This silver cup, wrought by Mr. Stone, was modeled after a pleasing example of Greek pottery dating from the fifth century, B. C, now preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In closing this appreciation of a master worker it would be quite unjust not to renew by a word the emphasis already placed upon the sympathetic environment in which Mr. Stone labors and lives. Once entered, this place of thought and endeavor cannot be forgotten—the family rooms with their outlook upon old-fashioned gardens, with their discreet ornaments : an illuminated manuscript open upon a lectern, the bronze relief of "King Arthur" by the master of the house, finished to the last minute link of chain armour and the weightless fleck of gold inlay; finally, the hospitable table laid with silver shaped in the neighboring workshop. And everywhere is felt the vivacious energy of the house-mistress who marshals the labor about her with the ability of a general in the field.
Arthur J. Stone in his workshop at Gardner, Massachusetts
Source: Metal Record and Electroplater - October 1918
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By Irene Sargent, Litt. M. (Professor of the History of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N. Y.)
Recent Specimens from the Workshop of the Eminent Massachusetts Metalsmith, Arthur J. Stone.
Magnificent Ciborium-Monstrance for Boston Church.
Some years ago, the jewelry and metalworking industries, particularly the workers in the precious metals, were tremendously interested in a wonderful gold and jeweled chalice, wrought for Trinity Church, Boston, in memory of the lamented artist and writer, Mrs. Sarah Whitman. This was the work of the eminent Massachusetts metalsmith, Arthur J. Stone, but even that lovely work of this master craftsman in gold and silver has now been surpassed, certainly in delicacy and elaboration, in a ciborium-monstrance, now a treasure of the Lady Chapel of the Church of the Advent, Boston, and the product of the Stone workshop at Gardner. This latest masterpiece provides the major topic and principal illustrations of this article.
In view of the widely diffused fame of the two ecclesiastical pieces just mentioned, as also of the loving cup given by the Factulty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University to President Eliot, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, it might seem superfluous in this place to make allusion to the career of the metalsmith, their author, but, at least, one may emphasize his seven years' apprenticeship in his native city, Sheffield, England; his enthusiastic study, as a boy, of both music and literature, pursued as far as permitted by limited time and means; his valuable experience as a craftsman at Edinburgh; his skill as a designer formed by adequate art courses in his native country, and his refined taste self-developed by research in libraries and by the consequent broad acquaintance with historical examples of his craft. Nor is it untimely to repeat an opinion expressed the current year by a critic in the New York Times, at the moment of an exhibition at the Little Gallery, in that city, when he estimated Mr. Stone as the first of living silversmiths. And while this opinion may appear to be a strong assertion, since technicians are wont to be judged from varying points of view—such as those of nationality and school—it will serve in spite of any personal preferences or prejudices, to rank this craftsman among the most distinguished men of his calling, wherever existing, and also to attract to his work the interest of many persons deprived of expert knowledge of his special field of artistic labor. Moreover, it would seem reasonable that, at least, the Ciborium-Monstrance of our illustrations, by its sole and rare perfection of workmanship, might stand as the latest and highest example of an historical series beginning with the crude yet effective methods of the makers of the Lombard Crown and the insignia of Charlemagne, including the Byzantine-German silver altar-front of Saint Ambrose in Milan and the resplendent Pala d' Oro or reredos at Saint Mark's, Venice, thence passing to the cups and the figure-work, in both noble metals, of the renowned sixteenth century Florentine master, Benvenuto Cellini—all of these being survivals out of the chaos of either governmental or private vicissitudes of fortune and causing the student-observer to marvel that they have so long evaded the melting-pot, that Moloch fatal to masterpieces of monetary value; causing him also to thank God that the exquisite modern work, contact with which is restricted to the consecrated hand of the priest alone, is beyond a possibility of danger, protected from the desecrating and bestial intrusion of the spiked helmet.
In presenting the illustrations of the Ciborium- or Pyx-Monstrance, it is important briefly to explain the service to which this form of sacred vessel is consecrated in the Roman and in the stricter branch of the Anglican Communion. The first of these three specially used words was originally applied to the canopy erected over the high altar in certain early churches and was so called because of its resemblance to the calyx and seed-pod of the Egyptian lotus-flower. It was later transferred to the receptacle for the consecrated wafer or Host, and its linguistic connection with the Latin cibus, food, became intensely significant in the sense of spiritual sustenance, although the food at first indicated was the seed or bean which was a staple article of consumption of the people of the Nile Valley.
The second name, derived from the Greek, has as its simple equivalent the English word "box"; but, by extension of meaning, it was given to the State Treasury at Athens and throughout the literature of our own mother-tongue it has held the savor of sanctity, as may be realized by reference to the great dictionary of the Oxford scholar, Murray, who, in a long sequence of authors, quotes Mrs. Browning in her allusion to "the pure pyx of love." In the myths of certain Greek deities, as, for example, those of Apollo and Psyche—highest of intellectual and mystical types-—a pyx is the guardian of secrets awful in import. Therefore, it was natural that when Christianity superseded paganism, the Greek word was retained, although it was glorified by a new meaning, just as the figures of the Saviour were interpreted by early Christian Mosaicists from that of Hermes, guardian of flocks, and from that of Amphion, who according to the significant legend, by the rhythmical chords of his lyre drew the world under the rule of law and order. As a last comment upon the word "pyx," it is to be noted that while by the earlier English liturgical writers it appears to be used interchangeably with the term "ciborium," to designate the receptacle of consecrated wafers, it is, at the present time, more especially applied to the small gold or silver box containing the Eucharist or communion carried by the visiting priest to the dwellings of his parishioners lying sick.
The third and last of the words, "monstrance," is the name accepted for a vessel quite distinct from the pyx, ritualistic in purpose, essential to public worship, and so constructed as to display the Body of Christ, that is, the consecrated wafer, to the congregation kneeling in adoration, as it is raised on high in the hand of the celebrant priest; this moment being the most solemn of the ritual: the altar-bell announcing that the miracle of Transubstantiation has been accomplished, and, often in European towns, the bells in the church-towers proclaiming the consummation abroad to the people. The monstrance appears in its most familiar form in the widely-known mural painting by Raphael in the Vatican, which shows the assembly of the Church Militant, gathered about an altar, with the greatest of Catholic philosophers, Saint Thomas Aquinas, pointing to the vessel, as a symbol of the principal doctrine of the Church; while, enthroned in the clouds above, sit the Christ, the Virgin, and John the Forerunner, presiding over the Church Triumphant. In this instance, as upon most modern altars, the monstrance has the form of a simple gold candlestick topped by a circular rim surrounded by rays, the enclosed space being filled with a crystal through which is seen the opaque white of the wafer. And if such be the original and authentic form of this ecclesiastical vessel, the intention of the designer of the Ciborium or Pyx-Monstrance of our illustrations would seem clearly to indicate by structural line and by emphasis of detail the symbolism of the two elements of the Mass: the Sacrifice and the Sacrament; to offer to the mind of the worshiper the idea of a Holy Treasure guarded from profane contact and to present to his eye a Visible Divine Presence which should compel ecstasy and afford a foretaste of Heaven.
Considered purely as a work of art, the exquisite object stands aloof from all that is modern in the depreciatory sense of that term. It is free from the indefinite, penetrating element of insincerity and vanity which, too often guiding the work of both hand and brain today, is actually felt by the sensitive, yet cannot be explained through the inflexible medium of words. It would, perhaps, be better to say that the Ciborium in design and execution expresses the Gothic ideals: the fervent love of the beautiful in line and color, the care for the adaptation of part to part, that is, the feeling for proportion, above all, the patience and skill in labor which seek no material reward. It has been firmly held by the craftsman, as well as by the architect, within the limits of artistic tradition, but, at the same time, it is vitally individual. Once seen, it remains in the memory with the supreme treasures of certain Old World sacristies; such as the Reliquary of the Chapel of the Holy Blood at Bruges; only, when subjected to such comparison, it is felt to have over its similars advantages which could not have been possessed by any work of the Middle Ages. It was designed out of a wide survey of centuries of artistic production rendered accessible through schools, technical books and travel. It was materially wrought by finer tools and more perfect methods than were known to the metalsmiths of former periods.
When placed in the Church of the Advent, Boston, at Eastertide of 1909, it awakened much interest in church circles throughout the United States, not alone because of its wonderful beauty and richness, but also owing to the distinction of its architect, Mr. Cleveland, associated with Messieurs Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, the leading American exponents of Gothic, and equally owing to the name of its maker, Arthur Stone, whose reputation, established many years before in England, had extended to the centers of wealth and culture in his adopted country, many of which possessed examples of his work. The completion of the Ciborium was noted at length by the press of the town of Gardner, Mass., the place of Mr. Stone's residence, which he had chosen by preference and which he has always maintained because of his marriage with a prominent lady of the community, who is not without skill in her husband's craft and whose talent for organization and the direction of labor and affairs has contributed inestimably to the efficiency of his workshop.
The principal article locally published regarding the Ciborium, was. a detailed description which, afterward copied by the Boston press and in various periodicals, appears to be the source of information from which all succeeding references to the work have been drawn. This article presents plainly numerous valuable facts and contains but one statement which might be modified and that one only when considered to be of general application, rather than restricted to the instance in point. It concerns the distinction therein made between the two parts of the altar-vessel described; noting that the wafers before their consecration are reserved in the first mentioned receptacle, while, as its name implies, the second protects and displays the consecrated Host. But, as one may find by reference to the great dictionary of Littre in the French language and to that of Tommaseo-Bellini in the Italian, the accepted use of the Ciborium is to contain the Element in which transubstantiation has already been accomplished by the prayer of the priest: a discrepancy which is easily explained when one remembers that the two vessels—the Sacramental and the Sacrificial—are rarely united in a single body, as in the exquisite example of our discussion.
This is certainly a Sacrament-House, as religiously conceived and wrought as the greater one in stone of Adam Krafft in the Church of Saint Laurence at Nurnberg, the hard, stubborn material of which is said to have softened at the prayer of the master craftsman, until he had given it a lace-like delicacy and then to have resumed the hardness which has assured its permanence. That entrancing work is treasured by critics as one of the final, most florid and imaginative expressions of the Gothic, before the influence of Luther, like a killing frost, withered the ecclesiastical art of Germany, except that of music which alone remained to satisfy the longing for beauty which is inseparable from the impulse to adore and worship. But while the masterpiece of Krafft developed in a yet sympathetic environment, the Ciborium of the Advent took form more than four hundred years later, in the New World, without artistic traditions and out of a society which, before the war that is now waging, materialism was believed to have expelled spirituality. Still, that imponderable, ethereal quality exhales from this modern Sacrament-House, the miniature proportions of which are so harmoniously kept in scale that the effect of the structure is august; the brilliancy of the gold and jewels recalling the Vision of Saint John and the beholder of its loveliness being inspired to articulate the words of the ritual: Holy! Holy! Holy! And while the vessel is eloquent of its sacred use, it cannot remain silent concerning its makers, testifying to their purity of inspiration and purpose, as a child noble in mind and bearing glorifies his lineage. From the same studio as the Ciborium issued that convincing volume, "The Gothic Quest," of Ralph Adams Cram, upon whom has fallen the mantle of the mediaeval builders and within a New England workshop, austere, scrupulously swept and garnished, ordered as if by a master of rhythm, the drawing of the architect took on the third dimension and rose from the bench ready to receive the Corporeal Presence of the Deity.
But now so far afield from the commonplace of fact, one must return to give the dimensions of the Ciborium and to indicate the character and
arrangement of its ornament, as they are recorded in the already-mentioned descriptive article. The height of the object is fifteen and one-half inches and its weight eighty-five Troy ounces, with its substance wholly of gold— eighteen karat for the structural parts and twenty for much of the overlaid ornament; the accompanying jewels being sixty-eight diamonds, ranging from several of considerable size to tiny, spark-like gems set as the stamens of passion-flowers and in the hair of the standing angels, together with large faceted amethysts and a single superb garnet, the two last-named species of precious stones having each the color symbolic of sacrifice and atonement, since from the Roman Imperial times down to the great period of English literature confusion is to be noted in the distinctions made by writers between deep red and purple—even the poet Gray using the latter color-adjective, instead of a word meaning rosy or blushing, when alluding to the season of spring.
Referring once more to the original description, one finds the style of the composition indicated as "late Venetian Gothic," a statement which, perhaps, might have been omitted, since little that is strictly and solely typical of the place and period named is apparent in the work, unless it be luxuriance of detail, which was, however, more characteristic of Venice in the late Renaissance than during the prevalence of Gothic. Again the hexagonal dome, with the crockets climbing its ribs, gests a Northern, rather than a Byzantine origin; the cusped arches of the canopies above the heads of the angels might be early Tuscan, suggested by originals in Niccola's Pulpit at Pisa—the first monument of Italian sculpture—while the cross surmounting the whole has the proportions of the Latin type, which symbolizes the Atonement, instead of the Greek form with equal arms (signifying broadly the Christian Faith), a modification of which appears in repeats around the drum or base of the dome. One detail, however, strongly reminiscent of Venice, resides in the branches of foliage, treated in very distinct leaflets and pointing sharply upward over the concave shells which separate the canopies: this treatment resembling the ornament which serves to frame certain windows in the old, populous parish of San Zaccaria and certain others, overlooking narrow canals through which the observer shoots all too rapidly, and having once passed, with difficulty locates the fugitive treasures in the tangled maze of waterways.
Continuing one by one and indefinitely, one might select beautiful features of the Ciborium for comment and classification. But to enjoy the work more fully than by this means, it is necessary only to seize the symbolism of the passion-vine, the Crucifix, the instruments of torture, the angel-and-animal forms of the Four Evangelists and then to absorb one's self in the satisfying beauty of the design and the workmanship. And it is pleasurable to retrace in thought the evolution of the labor from its inception in the working drawings of the architect, now in the possession of Mr. Stone, through the plaster-casts of the sculptor Kirchmayer to the completed object which, in its present environment, seems imperishable. And deeper and deeper becomes the impression made by the skill of execution: the work of the chisel and of the multitude of delicate tools bewildering to the inexperienced, the soldered "mounts" so securely and precisely placed, the intricate patterns spread over the standard and the body of the Ciborium, as a luxuriant growth of foliage and flowers mantles a wall.
As one observes and examines, the conviction grows almost to a certainty that skill of hand is a Divine possession, that musicians, painters, and artificers like Mr. Stone, who command it to a degree almost inconceivable, are more to be envied than great theorists who formulate truths however valuable, but who are powerless to make appeal to our ear, our eyes, our emotions, since, after all is said, the gratification of the senses is the first care of the human being, whether he be savage or yet saturate with civilization.
To the reader, denied the sight of the actual object, it may be only just to quote fragments from the detailed description, which he may consult as he follows in our illustration the form of the Ciborium, from the inscription in beautiful uncial letters at the base, upward along the chalice-like stem of the vessel to the knop or bulb adapted to the grasp of the hand, then to the body proper, with above the monstrance protected by its angel guardians that support the dome surmounted by the Cross.
The fragmentary quotations, arranged in correct sequence and omissions being made in order to conserve space, stand as follows:
"The structure of the vessel is hexagonal, the base mounting in contracting concave curves to the knop and the latter forming a standard for a six-sided turreted box—the ciborium or pyx—from the center of the low cover of which, again hexagonal, rises the disc of the monstrance with its watch-like crystals containing the lunetts to hold firmly and away from the protecting medium the consecrated wafer. The monstrance is covered by a canopy, the supports of which spring from the cover of the ciborium and are in reality minute architectural piers with a podium or base, on which stand angels with folded draperies and one knee advanced, recalling Greek caryatides. These figures have outstretched wings, tip touching tip, and above the head of each is a domed tabernacle elaborately chiseled with leafage and set with a diamond; the space between each two tabernacles being occupied by shell-formed arches, the concave flutes of which center in cherubs' heads, while tall pinnacles flank the arches and terminate in the fleur-de-lis so familiar to all students of Gothic. The pinnacles in their turn lead the eye upward along the proportionately tall drum of the dome to its hexagonal cap which is accented along its ribs with crockets of foliage; the foliage finally forming at the summit of the dome a base for the Cross studded with diamonds."
If the reader will turn now from the plates here presented of the Ciborium, he will observe that in other ecclesiastical pieces by Mr. Stone this work finds worthy, if less elaborate, companions. Prominent among these is the magnificent cross executed for the Chapel of Saint Andrew, St. James' Church, Chicago. In this example the virile structural form is neither weakened nor deadened by the rich ornamentation. Its design issued from the brain of a student conversant with his theme and exceptionally sympathetic; since the elements composing it have been gathered from widely-separated periods and schools of art and then fused together into an organic whole, with no trace left of what might be termed the articulations or seams. Therefore, the style must be indicated as mediaeval in a broad sense, as it includes details easily recognized as Gothic, Lombardic and Byzantine; while the materials are such as would have been used in association by the decorative artists of Constantinople, who were supreme in their field from the sixth to the twelfth century, during which very considerable lapse of time they sent equally their works and their pupils westward to embellish the rapidly-multiplying churches of Europe.
As is plainly evident in our illustration, the effect made by this Cross is that of a piece of sculpture, for which the pierced work of the base and the buttresses with their crocketed pinnacles are quite as responsible as are the ivory reliefs accentuating the figure of a Greek cross, which is apparently superposed on the long vertical arm of the Latin symbol; this vertical slightly altering the accepted proportions to a greater slenderness very agreeable to the eye and saved from any suspicion of instability by the elaboration of the base. The colors of the materials (which are ebony, silver, ivory and gold) concur in a rich tranquil harmony appropriate to the subdued light of a sanctuary: while the details into which these materials are wrought offer an interesting and varied field for study.
The subject of historic ornament, never narrow nor dull, becomes most alluring when it opens the mediaeval world, suggesting the currents and movements that swept through it, the wanderings of the barbarians, and the races which then entered into the bitter struggles between Church and State. And all these indications, for one able to read them, are present in the combinations of Motifs offered in this lovely Altar Cross; constituting as it were, a code concealing a significant message. As the eye of the observer sweep's upward from the base it is arrested by the effective letters of the inscription, which, usually called uncial from their hooked or claw-like forms, are modifications of the type created by the artist-monks of Charlemagne after the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin had taught the Emperor to read and when the latter's zeal for learning was such that he caused reliquaries, made froin precious metals and shaped like initial letters, to be sent to religious communities throughout his dominions, there to be copied into Psalters, Gospels and Hour-Books. Above the inscription the rope-pattern, so effective in silver, is used quite emphatically to divide the sections of the standard, and this motif, occurring in Saint Michael's Pavia, and in other treasure-houses of Lombardic art, is said to be derived from the cordage of the Viking boat. Could there well be two more mutually hostile memories brought into each other's presence than those of Charlemagne and the Lombards? And could there be a more harmonious result? Again, within the sections one finds a maze of motifs in pierced work, largely barbarous Roman or Romanesque, like the ornament of old churches in Southern Italy, such as that of a famous portal of Molfetta—now, alas! injured by Austrian bombs—while higher, on the long vertical, there appear, as has been said gleaming surface of the central plaque, whose background is silver into which are set gold letters of modified Greek form: the initials and the finals of "Jesous Christos," and the entire Greek word "Nika" (conquers) in allusion to the Easter Triumph previously, Northern Gothic characteristics. Another change occurs in the ivory relief carvings wrought in the delicate Byzantine manner by Mr. Kirchmayer, which, framed in gold, define the superposed Greek cross. These reliefs, representing the great events in the history of Christ, emphasizes the flat, over Death and the Tomb. Workmanship in metal more beautiful than this cannot be easily imagined and if the piece shall survive accident and ravage, its claim to place Mr. Stone, as also the carver and the designer, among the immortals of their crafts will not be unsubstantial.
Another illustration—the covers of an altar-book—shows the delicate figure-work of Mr. Stone on flat bands of silver which divide the rectangular space covered with red Morocco into, four panels, medallions in very low relief occurring at the corners and in the center: those on the front representing the crucifixion and adoring angels; those on the reverse side being the Agnus Dei or Lamb with banner and the symbols of the Four Evangelists. Anatomy, muscular action and drapery are here rendered with the utmost refinement and, it would almost seem, with fairy tools. And the source of such skill was the training received through English apprenticeship and in British schools, as is proven by a small plaque of copper hanging in Mr. Stone's studio— an examination piece—on which are modeled in the same refined low relief, in proportions which would do honor to a Donatello, a conventional Italian Renaissance ornament and a spray of natural flowers rivaling the magic power of Rene Lalique.
A single one of our illustrations represents a secular piece, the dignity of which permits its display among objects of churchly service. It shows the chaste outlines of the memorial offered to President Eliot, of Harvard, by the donors and on the occasion mentioned at the beginning of the present article. This silver cup, wrought by Mr. Stone, was modeled after a pleasing example of Greek pottery dating from the fifth century, B. C, now preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In closing this appreciation of a master worker it would be quite unjust not to renew by a word the emphasis already placed upon the sympathetic environment in which Mr. Stone labors and lives. Once entered, this place of thought and endeavor cannot be forgotten—the family rooms with their outlook upon old-fashioned gardens, with their discreet ornaments : an illuminated manuscript open upon a lectern, the bronze relief of "King Arthur" by the master of the house, finished to the last minute link of chain armour and the weightless fleck of gold inlay; finally, the hospitable table laid with silver shaped in the neighboring workshop. And everywhere is felt the vivacious energy of the house-mistress who marshals the labor about her with the ability of a general in the field.
Arthur J. Stone in his workshop at Gardner, Massachusetts
Source: Metal Record and Electroplater - October 1918
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
Arthur J. Stone - Gardner, Mass. - 1904
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A 1915 biographical entry for Arthur J. Stone:
STONE, Arthur John, silversmith; b. Sheffield, Eng., Sept. 26, 1847; s. Joseph and Ann (Mills) Stones (final "s" in name dropped on coming to America); ed. ch. schs. of Sheffield and at Sheffield Sch. of Art; m. Gardner, Mass., 1896, Elizabeth Bent Eaton. Designer and chaser for James Dixon & Sons, Sheffield, 1874-84, and for W. B. Durgin, Concord, N.H., 1884-7: designer and head of hollowware dept., F. W. Smith & Co., Gardner, 1887-95; engaged in mfr. of silver toys with J. P. Howard, of Howard & Co., 5th Av., New York, 1895, 1896; an exponent of hand-wrought silver In the Arts and Crafts Movement since 1901; maker of the Pres. Eliot and Edwin Abbott loving cups and Sarah Wyman Whitman chalice, in Trinity Ch., Boston; maker of gold monstrance In Ch. of the Advent, Boston, communion plate and altar cross for St. Andrews Brotherhood, Ch. of St. James. Chicago. Episcopalian. Mason. Republican. Address: Sta. A, Gardner, Mass.
Source: Who's who in New England: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men and Women of the States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut - Albert Nelson Marquis - 1915
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STONE, Arthur John, silversmith; b. Sheffield, Eng., Sept. 26, 1847; s. Joseph and Ann (Mills) Stones (final "s" in name dropped on coming to America); ed. ch. schs. of Sheffield and at Sheffield Sch. of Art; m. Gardner, Mass., 1896, Elizabeth Bent Eaton. Designer and chaser for James Dixon & Sons, Sheffield, 1874-84, and for W. B. Durgin, Concord, N.H., 1884-7: designer and head of hollowware dept., F. W. Smith & Co., Gardner, 1887-95; engaged in mfr. of silver toys with J. P. Howard, of Howard & Co., 5th Av., New York, 1895, 1896; an exponent of hand-wrought silver In the Arts and Crafts Movement since 1901; maker of the Pres. Eliot and Edwin Abbott loving cups and Sarah Wyman Whitman chalice, in Trinity Ch., Boston; maker of gold monstrance In Ch. of the Advent, Boston, communion plate and altar cross for St. Andrews Brotherhood, Ch. of St. James. Chicago. Episcopalian. Mason. Republican. Address: Sta. A, Gardner, Mass.
Source: Who's who in New England: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men and Women of the States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut - Albert Nelson Marquis - 1915
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EXHIBITION OF INDUSTRIAL ART - THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF ARTS - 1916
An important loan exhibition of industrial art, similar in character to that held the year before, was assembled in the new building under the auspices of The American Federation of Arts and opened with a special view on the evening of May 17, 1916, the first meeting day of the seventh convention of that association. It occupied, as in 1915, the large main hall on the ground floor, together with five communicating rooms, and was continued for one month. The arrangements on the part of the Federation, which issued a brief catalogue of the exhibits, were conducted by its secretary, Miss Leila Mechlin, while the installation was chiefly made by employees of the Museum under the direction of Mr. William H. Holmes and Mr. F. L. Lewton.
Both hand and machine work were shown, and about 70 exhibitors participated, including some of the best known workers in art craft in the country. While the exhibition was not as large or comprehensive as could be wished for, a fairly high standard was maintained and in some respects the results were very gratifying. That it was appreciated was indicated by the large attendance of visitors at all times.
................The exhibit of metal work and jewelry, though restricted, was excellent both in design and workmanship. Karl Kipp, of East Aurora, N. Y., was represented by 4 pieces of hand-wrought copper; George P. Blanchard & Son, of Gardner, Mass., by silver spoons and forks and a mounted series showing 12 stages in the making of a hand-wrought spoon in sterling silver; Arthur J. Stone, of the same place, by 11 spoons and 2 silver bowls of exquisite design; and George E. Germer, of Boston, by a bronze cast of the Proctor Memorial Tablet at Princeton University. The jewelry, consisting of necklaces, pendants, pins, rings, cuff buttons and a silver jewel case, was from Frank Gardner Hale and Margaret Rogers, of Boston; Grace Hazen, of New York; Herbert Kelly, of Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., and James H. Winn, of Chicago.
Source: Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution - 1917
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An important loan exhibition of industrial art, similar in character to that held the year before, was assembled in the new building under the auspices of The American Federation of Arts and opened with a special view on the evening of May 17, 1916, the first meeting day of the seventh convention of that association. It occupied, as in 1915, the large main hall on the ground floor, together with five communicating rooms, and was continued for one month. The arrangements on the part of the Federation, which issued a brief catalogue of the exhibits, were conducted by its secretary, Miss Leila Mechlin, while the installation was chiefly made by employees of the Museum under the direction of Mr. William H. Holmes and Mr. F. L. Lewton.
Both hand and machine work were shown, and about 70 exhibitors participated, including some of the best known workers in art craft in the country. While the exhibition was not as large or comprehensive as could be wished for, a fairly high standard was maintained and in some respects the results were very gratifying. That it was appreciated was indicated by the large attendance of visitors at all times.
................The exhibit of metal work and jewelry, though restricted, was excellent both in design and workmanship. Karl Kipp, of East Aurora, N. Y., was represented by 4 pieces of hand-wrought copper; George P. Blanchard & Son, of Gardner, Mass., by silver spoons and forks and a mounted series showing 12 stages in the making of a hand-wrought spoon in sterling silver; Arthur J. Stone, of the same place, by 11 spoons and 2 silver bowls of exquisite design; and George E. Germer, of Boston, by a bronze cast of the Proctor Memorial Tablet at Princeton University. The jewelry, consisting of necklaces, pendants, pins, rings, cuff buttons and a silver jewel case, was from Frank Gardner Hale and Margaret Rogers, of Boston; Grace Hazen, of New York; Herbert Kelly, of Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., and James H. Winn, of Chicago.
Source: Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution - 1917
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BOSTON SOCIETY OF ARTS AND CRAFTS
THE COMMITTEE ON THE LIBRARY
The Committee on the Library report as follows: On January 12, 1909, the following brief talks were given in connection with the opening of the special exhibition of Pottery:
Design and its Relation to Pottery, by A. B. Leboutillier The Use of Tiles in Architecture, by Allen W. Jackson Pottery in the Gardens, by E. E. Soderholz On February 23rd Mr. Kershaw spoke on Color in Metals in connection with the opening night of a special exhibition of Copper, Brass and Iron. On November 16th, the opening night of the special exhibition of Silverware, Mrs. Arthur J. Stone read a paper on Handwrought Silver: the Observations of an Onlooker.
On December 6th the members of the Society and their friends were invited to an informal talk on Ironwork at the shop of Frederic Krasser. In addition to these talks arranged by the committee, Mrs. James A. Garland invited the members of the Society to see the Garland Collection on March 17th; and on April 1st Mrs. John L. Gardner opened Fenway Court to the Craftsmen and Masters of the Society.
Source: Annual Report - Boston Society of Arts and Crafts - 1910
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THE COMMITTEE ON THE LIBRARY
The Committee on the Library report as follows: On January 12, 1909, the following brief talks were given in connection with the opening of the special exhibition of Pottery:
Design and its Relation to Pottery, by A. B. Leboutillier The Use of Tiles in Architecture, by Allen W. Jackson Pottery in the Gardens, by E. E. Soderholz On February 23rd Mr. Kershaw spoke on Color in Metals in connection with the opening night of a special exhibition of Copper, Brass and Iron. On November 16th, the opening night of the special exhibition of Silverware, Mrs. Arthur J. Stone read a paper on Handwrought Silver: the Observations of an Onlooker.
On December 6th the members of the Society and their friends were invited to an informal talk on Ironwork at the shop of Frederic Krasser. In addition to these talks arranged by the committee, Mrs. James A. Garland invited the members of the Society to see the Garland Collection on March 17th; and on April 1st Mrs. John L. Gardner opened Fenway Court to the Craftsmen and Masters of the Society.
Source: Annual Report - Boston Society of Arts and Crafts - 1910
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10th ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF ART CRAFTS - ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO - 1911
The exhibition season opened this year with the tenth Annual Exhibition of Art Crafts, October 3. The Exhibition, which was a great success, closed October 25.
The prizes were awarded as follows: The Mrs. Albert H. Loeb Prize of fifty dollars for the best original single piece of silverware was awarded to Arthur J. Stone of Gardner, Mass. The Arthur Heun Prize of fifty dollars was awarded to Mrs. Josephine Hartwell Shaw of Brookline, Mass. The Alumni Association Honorable Mention was awarded to Hazel Lee Wilcox of Kansas City, Mo. The Craftswork Purchase was awarded to George P. Blanchard, of Gardner, Mass. The Atlan Club Prize was not awarded this year.
Source: Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago - January 1912
Trev.
The exhibition season opened this year with the tenth Annual Exhibition of Art Crafts, October 3. The Exhibition, which was a great success, closed October 25.
The prizes were awarded as follows: The Mrs. Albert H. Loeb Prize of fifty dollars for the best original single piece of silverware was awarded to Arthur J. Stone of Gardner, Mass. The Arthur Heun Prize of fifty dollars was awarded to Mrs. Josephine Hartwell Shaw of Brookline, Mass. The Alumni Association Honorable Mention was awarded to Hazel Lee Wilcox of Kansas City, Mo. The Craftswork Purchase was awarded to George P. Blanchard, of Gardner, Mass. The Atlan Club Prize was not awarded this year.
Source: Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago - January 1912
Trev.
Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
NATIONAL SOCIETY OF CRAFTSMEN - SUMMER EXHIBITION - SUGAR HILL - 1908
At The summer exhibition of the society at Sugar Hill, the collection of jewelry has attracted much favorable notice.
Mr. J. F. Hewes has a series of finely mounted carbuncles, turquoises, catseyes, et cetera. Mrs. Froelich sends a fine series of rings, buckles, etc.
Mr. B. B. Thresher carries out the true handicraft idea in his work, both in point of design and technique. His collection is attracting much attention.
Among others exhibiting jewelry are Miss Virginia Senseney, Gustav Rogers, Paul H. Schramm, Miss Pfeiffer, the Rokesley Shops, the Navajo Indians, Henry A. Garden, the Hartford Arts and Crafts, Frederick S. Gardner and John O. Winchie, C. R. Hatheway.
.......Mr. Arthur Stone exhibits a collection of silverware, spoons and ladles, which are unusual in design. There is good wrought metal work by Dr. Beattie, Jane Roberts and Caroline S. Ogden, the latter showing desk pads, ink-wells, etc.
.......Mr. Charles Burdick has developed a new method of applying mosaic to brass and copper, and Samuel Bulloss has examples of silver and gold plating upon hand-wrought copper puff-boxes, caskets, etc., which are unusual in surface quality and attractive to the touch.
Source: The International Studio - September 1908
Trev.
At The summer exhibition of the society at Sugar Hill, the collection of jewelry has attracted much favorable notice.
Mr. J. F. Hewes has a series of finely mounted carbuncles, turquoises, catseyes, et cetera. Mrs. Froelich sends a fine series of rings, buckles, etc.
Mr. B. B. Thresher carries out the true handicraft idea in his work, both in point of design and technique. His collection is attracting much attention.
Among others exhibiting jewelry are Miss Virginia Senseney, Gustav Rogers, Paul H. Schramm, Miss Pfeiffer, the Rokesley Shops, the Navajo Indians, Henry A. Garden, the Hartford Arts and Crafts, Frederick S. Gardner and John O. Winchie, C. R. Hatheway.
.......Mr. Arthur Stone exhibits a collection of silverware, spoons and ladles, which are unusual in design. There is good wrought metal work by Dr. Beattie, Jane Roberts and Caroline S. Ogden, the latter showing desk pads, ink-wells, etc.
.......Mr. Charles Burdick has developed a new method of applying mosaic to brass and copper, and Samuel Bulloss has examples of silver and gold plating upon hand-wrought copper puff-boxes, caskets, etc., which are unusual in surface quality and attractive to the touch.
Source: The International Studio - September 1908
Trev.
Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
DEATHS
Gardner, Mass. (AP) - Relatives today arranged for the funeral of Arthur John Stone, 90, widely known silversmith. He designed and executed many elaborate church pieces, including the gold monstrance in the Church of Advent, Boston
Source: Nashua Telegraph - 7th February 1938
Trev.
Gardner, Mass. (AP) - Relatives today arranged for the funeral of Arthur John Stone, 90, widely known silversmith. He designed and executed many elaborate church pieces, including the gold monstrance in the Church of Advent, Boston
Source: Nashua Telegraph - 7th February 1938
Trev.
Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
APOSTLES IN THE TASTE OF SILVER
By Ralph Bergengren
In the salesroom of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts is a display of silverware — jugs, bowls, trays, tankards, teapots, cream pitchers, and the rest of the cheerful family — shining behind sliding glass doors and looking at first glance like a collection of fine old English plate. Taken altogether it might belong to the pre-Victorian period of substantial yet graceful shapes and quiet ornamentation; it suggests our mental picture of the polite hospitality of eighteenth-century homes, and leads also to the notion that the collector has had the rare good fortune to “pick up” a large number of pieces by the same maker. And this is in part true, for the majority of them come from the same workshop; and in part false, for they are not Old English but Modern American. Behind them, to be sure, is an apprenticeship, many years ago, to a Sheffield silversmith; and in them, which is here of first importance, is an individuality easily detected if the pieces are compared, one by one, with examples of the earlier plate which they have altogether suggested. More, perhaps, than any other craftsman the maker of domestic silverware works in a medium of very subtle self-expression; the “newness” of the shape that comes into being under his hammers must, to a large extent, grow out of his own sensitiveness to graceful contour; he is, in a way, like a man making the letters of the alphabet — the form is familiar and yet the character of the man will come out in his handwriting. If he designs a bowl of silver, he follows in the path of many who have designed silver bowls but his own bowl will subtly express himself. Granting an equal skill of the craft, a mean man would make a mean bowl and a generous man would make a generous one. In this sense we may fairly enough speak of the work of a man’s hands as “living”; and for this reason the work of a skilled craftsman is always a different and finer product than the work of a factory.
Mr. Arthur J. Stone, who made the silverware that has led to this little lecture, lives and works in Gardner, Massachusetts, where the up-and-down character of the streets must sometimes remind him of youthful days in Sheffield and Edinborough; a tall, pleasantly direct sort of man, who carries himself, even under the ample folds of a craftsman’s blouse, in the well-groomed, morning-tubbed way that we have come to consider characteristic of Englishmen. I found him finishing one of a pair of altar vases for a memorial chapel, examining through critical eyeglasses the decoration of small gold bunches of grapes which he had added by piecing the silver and inserting the many tiny bits of gold. Further along the bench a young man hammered a small bar of silver with a small, flat-headed steel hammer, beating out the handle of what would some day be a handwrought fork; and between the master craftsman and his assistant stood a large, round, and appetizing-looking object.
"What is this," said I, "that so deliciously resembles a very large chocolate cake?"
It made one hungry to look at, for it was of uncommonly generous proportions, richly brown, gigantic, mouth-watering, and with an outline of a fork in the frosting, as if the cook had been called away before smoothing it over - a cake well worthy of being of being approached with dereference and handwrought silver.
"Pitch," said the silversmith. "There is more of it in the bucket over by the gas stove where we melt it up. This particular cake has been used in ornamenting a fork and has taken an impress of the metal. Here is some more of it." He picked up what looked like a sphere of silver, holding it with a kind of respectful tenderness - somewhat as Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick — which I had already noticed in his handling of the silver-and-gold altar vase, and showed me that the sphere was really flattened at the poles and consisted of two small silver bowls, filled with pitch and temporarily fastened together. Eventually they would be finger bowls for somebody’s table.
In anticipation I had expected to meet this substance in all its proverbial blackness. Long before the Book of Exodus made the first known mention of spoons in literature, goldsmiths and silversmiths must have worked with it, pouring the melted pitch into hollow metal vessels, and letting it harden to provide a firm yet yielding surface against which to hammer a design in the metal and warming it to get it conveniently out again. For the craft of the gold and silversmith is necessarily a combination of a tool, a hammer, and a support for the under side of the metal; the craftsman must be able to strike blows of amazing nicety and almost unbelievable variation. At one extreme he must strike the end of his tool so gently into the silver that only the precise instruments of a scientific laboratory could possibly measure the depression: or, at the other, he comes to anvil work and beats the metal with a vigor that “raises” it by slow degrees from a flat, dull disk of silver to the shape of a pitcher, vase, bowl, or tankard. He is a man of many hammers, each with the face highly polished — for if a hair comes between the hammer and the silver, the silver will take an impression of it — varying in size and shape, and all alike in having a handle that allows, even when the blow is sturdy, for a certain kind of friendly gentleness. Perhaps you will argue that it is neither friendly nor gentle to beat an innocent piece of metal until it has lost its malleability and then plunge it into an annealing bath of fire until it is again amenable to beating; and I can only assure you that this sense of a friendly and considerate relation between the smith and his metal remains as a definite impression of the Gardner workshop. There is a whole essay on the Art of the Hammer in a broken handle that has been worn to the breaking point under many years of delicate friction by the craftsman’s thumb and fingers. “ Sterling” silver, which means 925/1000 of the pure metal, does not like to be driven; there must always be something persuasive as well as compelling about the stroke of the hammer, whether it is raising a piece of plate from the flat metal, or ornamenting it with the help of an indefinite number of tools that remind one of the implements used for tooling a book cover. In the one case the design is imparted bit by bit by pressing the tool into the leather; in the other it is formed by striking the tool with a hammer. To decorate a square inch on one of the altar vases, for example, Mr. Stone had needed the help of some twenty or more tools from the several hundred that are on the bench within reach of him, some bearing the initial he put there for identification when he was still a Sheffield apprentice.
Here, in brief, including the numerous forms of steel — “stakes,” “heads,” and “swages” — over which the metal is beaten in process of raising it from a sheet of silver to the form of a bowl, vase, pitcher, or other piece of finished plate, is a most surprising medley of implements; and one of the exceptional men nowadays who is equally master of all of them. Nor must I omit that reminder of Buffalo Bill, the hammer made from the tip of a buffalo horn. To what degree the buffalo-horn tip, the wooden mallet, or the steel hammer can justly claim pre-eminence in raising silver is a matter for discussion among silversmiths; but I suspect that Mr. Stone’s opinion is that it depends chiefly upon the hand behind the hammer. This is fortunate, for the extinction of the buffalo will lead eventually to the extinction of his tip. And as a matter of amusing experiment Mr. Stone has himself done silverwork with a can opener, a carpenter’s hammer, a few chasing tools, a file, a flatiron, and an ordinary iron bolt.
Mr. Arthur J. Stone, master silversmith, medalist of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and one of the first active silver workers to take a helpful interest in the Arts and Crafts movement in America, was born in Sheffield, England, at about, or perhaps a little before, the time when protest against the deadening effect of machine methods in the making of objects of use and beauty began to gain headway in that country. It is both interesting and significant that he was associated with the formation of an Arts and Crafts Society in Sheffield on the eve of his departure for America; that he was later associated with the beginnings of the movement in Boston; and that he personally represents the emancipation of a craftsman from the hampering conditions and specialized labor of the factory system. His father had died when the boy was ten or eleven years old, leaving the family with scant resources. Until fourteen, when he could be legally apprenticed, the schoolboy was a miscellaneous wage-earner, picking up such odd jobs as a boy could turn his hand to for the help of the family budget. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Silversmith — a solemn business, with its contract in black Old English type, signed by three witnesses, and completed by giving the lad a “ fastening penny" in the shape of a half crown; and for seven years he did better than “conduct himself as an industrious and trustworthy apprentice." Three evenings a week, after the day’s work in the shop, he spent at the Sheffield National School of Design: the other evenings (his apprenticeship requiring fifty—nine hours work a week) he worked overtime to pay the tuition fee. For the first two years the mother of the apprentice received three shillings a week, which grew to ten during the last; and she agreed to “find and provide her son with wholesome and sufficient meat, drink, lodging, wearing apparel, medical and surgical aid, and other necessaries suitable for his trade and employment.” Incidentally, and outside the Black Letter contract, she supplied a little Clementi piano and the foundation of a pleasure in cultivated music that has kept on with silverwork, and has doubtless its part in forming the individuality that projects itself from behind the glass doors in the Arts and Crafts shop. Add something also for the habit of long walks in the country on holidays: “ Give me the clear blue sky above my head,” wrote Hazlitt, “and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot ~start some game on these lonely heaths.” Add, too, of somewhat later acquirement, an enjoyment of the poetry of Burns, which is sturdy fare and tasteless to any man without a wide sympathy for humankind and, as Stevenson puts it, for “mice, and flowers, and the devil himself.” All of this, I believe firmly, has its inescapable bearing upon the silverware, in which the design on paper must inevitably undergo some modification, out of the nature of the smith himself, as it takes shape in the metal: and here I think you would agree with me if you saw the intimacy between man and metal in the Gardner workshop, to say nothing of the Hamlet-and-the-skull-of-Yorick way of holding a silver vase.
But I have left Mr. Stone in Sheffield still serving his seven years' apprenticeship. He went from Sheffield to Edinborough, finding his first independent employment in a handicraft shop of some twenty workmen, where, during his day, the hundreds of pieces of fine old silver plate belonging to the house of Bute came to the shop for renovation. He returned to Sheffield, working at his craft, studying design under one of the masters of the School of Design, over-using his eyes until a London specialist ordered a vacation; and living half a mile from the Ruskin Museum, established in the early seventies, where he fraternized with the caretaker and his wife and spent many valuable hours over the Durer etchings and Ruskin’s painting of a peacock feather. To pack nine years into a sentence —— the craftsman turned his hand to the beautiful fluting and complicated repoussé that marked the period; made drawings, sketches, and working patterns; attracted the praise of Ruskin by his acanthus work on a candelabra; and was attracted by the advertising in British papers of American manufacturers who needed silversmiths. He left England the day after he had joined with several other craftsmen to form the Sheffield Society of Arts and Crafts. And, of course, he meant to come back.
Burns has something to say about the unreliability of human and mousy plans. The craftsman found employment in a silverware company in Concord, New Hampshire; left Concord to establish the hollow-ware department for a new factory in Gardner; left factory methods altogether to set up his own shop, not in England but in America. It began with one silversmith working by himself, had its discouragements, grew in spite of them, and is now a workshop of two stories, a master craftsman, and a small group of assistants. And the policy of this workshop is that the assistants are worthy of a better wage than they would receive under the usual commercial conditions;that they are entitled to share the profits; and that the one sure way to set and hold a standard of craftsmanship lies in a helpful goodfellowship between master and assistants. If you examine the product you will always find the initial of the craftsman who hammered it; behind that initial is the fact that Mr. Stone is the master hand with the hammer, and that many a hesitating shape has been brought to final grace by his own perfecting strokes. But it means little enough in print to say that the resulting shape departs subtly from the simple round or presents a charming variation from the simple oval. . . . The work must speak for itself to those who appreciate it: increase the number of them, and thus add materially to the more refined pleasures of living. The apostle spoon, with the apostle soldered to the handle, has gone out of fashion—one of them sold in 1902 for $3450—but I have a feeling that Mr. Stone is actively sending out apostles of taste in silver by his constant production of domestic silverware.
For that reason I am more interested in these domestic things than in such rarer and more lavishly beautiful objects as the golden pyx for the altar of the Church of the Advent in Boston, the loving cup presented to President Eliot on his seventieth birthday, or the altar vases with the golden bunches of grapes. But I am tempted to revive a bit of contemporary criticism of the Eliot cup to buttress what I have just been saying about the personal equation in the raising of metal. The design enlarged upon a Greek carchesium, or drinking cup of the early fifth century B.C. This Greek original was a piece of pottery, common at the time, which found its own suggestion in metal and was therefore a suitable form for retranslation. Of the Greek cup a discerning critic pointed out that the design embraced a scheme of proportion, critically termed the “golden section,” whose smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole: which is Greek to me, and probably to the reader. The point of interest is the same critic’s opinion that this scheme of proportion is not only preserved in Mr. Stone’s silver cup—but occurs more frequently. And this, in turn, was due to no definite determination of the silversmith to attain such and such mathematical proportions; rather it came from the individual sensitiveness to form that made the cup grow under his hands into a shape that critical examination might explain afterward by a formula deduced by studying the perfected work of earlier masters.
So, too, I can sense the pleasure that the craftsman took in the delicate and profuse ornamentation of the pyx (whose sacred purpose is to house the consecrated wafer in a noble dwelling), working in gold and diamonds, finishing tiny feathers in the wings of miniature praying angels, building Gothic pinnacles of gold, and persuading the precious metal to the form of little vines, leaves, and passion flowers: but I suspect that the man is happier, and more completely himself, when the work at hand has a simpler and more robust quality.
I have hinted at discouragements. Once, indeed, the silversmith turned his back on the craft, sold his tools, and was never going to have anything more to do with silver all the days of his life. He found other employment for his skill as a designer. But a few of the tools had not been sold: before long he was working in copper for his own pleasure, one of the results being a portrait of Joseph Jefferson as Rip: and not long after that he was again a silversmith. For Mr. Stone and the hammer are as inseparable in life as they are in the mark that identifies his silverware.
Source: House Beautiful - June 1915
Trev.
By Ralph Bergengren
In the salesroom of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts is a display of silverware — jugs, bowls, trays, tankards, teapots, cream pitchers, and the rest of the cheerful family — shining behind sliding glass doors and looking at first glance like a collection of fine old English plate. Taken altogether it might belong to the pre-Victorian period of substantial yet graceful shapes and quiet ornamentation; it suggests our mental picture of the polite hospitality of eighteenth-century homes, and leads also to the notion that the collector has had the rare good fortune to “pick up” a large number of pieces by the same maker. And this is in part true, for the majority of them come from the same workshop; and in part false, for they are not Old English but Modern American. Behind them, to be sure, is an apprenticeship, many years ago, to a Sheffield silversmith; and in them, which is here of first importance, is an individuality easily detected if the pieces are compared, one by one, with examples of the earlier plate which they have altogether suggested. More, perhaps, than any other craftsman the maker of domestic silverware works in a medium of very subtle self-expression; the “newness” of the shape that comes into being under his hammers must, to a large extent, grow out of his own sensitiveness to graceful contour; he is, in a way, like a man making the letters of the alphabet — the form is familiar and yet the character of the man will come out in his handwriting. If he designs a bowl of silver, he follows in the path of many who have designed silver bowls but his own bowl will subtly express himself. Granting an equal skill of the craft, a mean man would make a mean bowl and a generous man would make a generous one. In this sense we may fairly enough speak of the work of a man’s hands as “living”; and for this reason the work of a skilled craftsman is always a different and finer product than the work of a factory.
Mr. Arthur J. Stone, who made the silverware that has led to this little lecture, lives and works in Gardner, Massachusetts, where the up-and-down character of the streets must sometimes remind him of youthful days in Sheffield and Edinborough; a tall, pleasantly direct sort of man, who carries himself, even under the ample folds of a craftsman’s blouse, in the well-groomed, morning-tubbed way that we have come to consider characteristic of Englishmen. I found him finishing one of a pair of altar vases for a memorial chapel, examining through critical eyeglasses the decoration of small gold bunches of grapes which he had added by piecing the silver and inserting the many tiny bits of gold. Further along the bench a young man hammered a small bar of silver with a small, flat-headed steel hammer, beating out the handle of what would some day be a handwrought fork; and between the master craftsman and his assistant stood a large, round, and appetizing-looking object.
"What is this," said I, "that so deliciously resembles a very large chocolate cake?"
It made one hungry to look at, for it was of uncommonly generous proportions, richly brown, gigantic, mouth-watering, and with an outline of a fork in the frosting, as if the cook had been called away before smoothing it over - a cake well worthy of being of being approached with dereference and handwrought silver.
"Pitch," said the silversmith. "There is more of it in the bucket over by the gas stove where we melt it up. This particular cake has been used in ornamenting a fork and has taken an impress of the metal. Here is some more of it." He picked up what looked like a sphere of silver, holding it with a kind of respectful tenderness - somewhat as Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick — which I had already noticed in his handling of the silver-and-gold altar vase, and showed me that the sphere was really flattened at the poles and consisted of two small silver bowls, filled with pitch and temporarily fastened together. Eventually they would be finger bowls for somebody’s table.
In anticipation I had expected to meet this substance in all its proverbial blackness. Long before the Book of Exodus made the first known mention of spoons in literature, goldsmiths and silversmiths must have worked with it, pouring the melted pitch into hollow metal vessels, and letting it harden to provide a firm yet yielding surface against which to hammer a design in the metal and warming it to get it conveniently out again. For the craft of the gold and silversmith is necessarily a combination of a tool, a hammer, and a support for the under side of the metal; the craftsman must be able to strike blows of amazing nicety and almost unbelievable variation. At one extreme he must strike the end of his tool so gently into the silver that only the precise instruments of a scientific laboratory could possibly measure the depression: or, at the other, he comes to anvil work and beats the metal with a vigor that “raises” it by slow degrees from a flat, dull disk of silver to the shape of a pitcher, vase, bowl, or tankard. He is a man of many hammers, each with the face highly polished — for if a hair comes between the hammer and the silver, the silver will take an impression of it — varying in size and shape, and all alike in having a handle that allows, even when the blow is sturdy, for a certain kind of friendly gentleness. Perhaps you will argue that it is neither friendly nor gentle to beat an innocent piece of metal until it has lost its malleability and then plunge it into an annealing bath of fire until it is again amenable to beating; and I can only assure you that this sense of a friendly and considerate relation between the smith and his metal remains as a definite impression of the Gardner workshop. There is a whole essay on the Art of the Hammer in a broken handle that has been worn to the breaking point under many years of delicate friction by the craftsman’s thumb and fingers. “ Sterling” silver, which means 925/1000 of the pure metal, does not like to be driven; there must always be something persuasive as well as compelling about the stroke of the hammer, whether it is raising a piece of plate from the flat metal, or ornamenting it with the help of an indefinite number of tools that remind one of the implements used for tooling a book cover. In the one case the design is imparted bit by bit by pressing the tool into the leather; in the other it is formed by striking the tool with a hammer. To decorate a square inch on one of the altar vases, for example, Mr. Stone had needed the help of some twenty or more tools from the several hundred that are on the bench within reach of him, some bearing the initial he put there for identification when he was still a Sheffield apprentice.
Here, in brief, including the numerous forms of steel — “stakes,” “heads,” and “swages” — over which the metal is beaten in process of raising it from a sheet of silver to the form of a bowl, vase, pitcher, or other piece of finished plate, is a most surprising medley of implements; and one of the exceptional men nowadays who is equally master of all of them. Nor must I omit that reminder of Buffalo Bill, the hammer made from the tip of a buffalo horn. To what degree the buffalo-horn tip, the wooden mallet, or the steel hammer can justly claim pre-eminence in raising silver is a matter for discussion among silversmiths; but I suspect that Mr. Stone’s opinion is that it depends chiefly upon the hand behind the hammer. This is fortunate, for the extinction of the buffalo will lead eventually to the extinction of his tip. And as a matter of amusing experiment Mr. Stone has himself done silverwork with a can opener, a carpenter’s hammer, a few chasing tools, a file, a flatiron, and an ordinary iron bolt.
Mr. Arthur J. Stone, master silversmith, medalist of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and one of the first active silver workers to take a helpful interest in the Arts and Crafts movement in America, was born in Sheffield, England, at about, or perhaps a little before, the time when protest against the deadening effect of machine methods in the making of objects of use and beauty began to gain headway in that country. It is both interesting and significant that he was associated with the formation of an Arts and Crafts Society in Sheffield on the eve of his departure for America; that he was later associated with the beginnings of the movement in Boston; and that he personally represents the emancipation of a craftsman from the hampering conditions and specialized labor of the factory system. His father had died when the boy was ten or eleven years old, leaving the family with scant resources. Until fourteen, when he could be legally apprenticed, the schoolboy was a miscellaneous wage-earner, picking up such odd jobs as a boy could turn his hand to for the help of the family budget. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Silversmith — a solemn business, with its contract in black Old English type, signed by three witnesses, and completed by giving the lad a “ fastening penny" in the shape of a half crown; and for seven years he did better than “conduct himself as an industrious and trustworthy apprentice." Three evenings a week, after the day’s work in the shop, he spent at the Sheffield National School of Design: the other evenings (his apprenticeship requiring fifty—nine hours work a week) he worked overtime to pay the tuition fee. For the first two years the mother of the apprentice received three shillings a week, which grew to ten during the last; and she agreed to “find and provide her son with wholesome and sufficient meat, drink, lodging, wearing apparel, medical and surgical aid, and other necessaries suitable for his trade and employment.” Incidentally, and outside the Black Letter contract, she supplied a little Clementi piano and the foundation of a pleasure in cultivated music that has kept on with silverwork, and has doubtless its part in forming the individuality that projects itself from behind the glass doors in the Arts and Crafts shop. Add something also for the habit of long walks in the country on holidays: “ Give me the clear blue sky above my head,” wrote Hazlitt, “and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot ~start some game on these lonely heaths.” Add, too, of somewhat later acquirement, an enjoyment of the poetry of Burns, which is sturdy fare and tasteless to any man without a wide sympathy for humankind and, as Stevenson puts it, for “mice, and flowers, and the devil himself.” All of this, I believe firmly, has its inescapable bearing upon the silverware, in which the design on paper must inevitably undergo some modification, out of the nature of the smith himself, as it takes shape in the metal: and here I think you would agree with me if you saw the intimacy between man and metal in the Gardner workshop, to say nothing of the Hamlet-and-the-skull-of-Yorick way of holding a silver vase.
But I have left Mr. Stone in Sheffield still serving his seven years' apprenticeship. He went from Sheffield to Edinborough, finding his first independent employment in a handicraft shop of some twenty workmen, where, during his day, the hundreds of pieces of fine old silver plate belonging to the house of Bute came to the shop for renovation. He returned to Sheffield, working at his craft, studying design under one of the masters of the School of Design, over-using his eyes until a London specialist ordered a vacation; and living half a mile from the Ruskin Museum, established in the early seventies, where he fraternized with the caretaker and his wife and spent many valuable hours over the Durer etchings and Ruskin’s painting of a peacock feather. To pack nine years into a sentence —— the craftsman turned his hand to the beautiful fluting and complicated repoussé that marked the period; made drawings, sketches, and working patterns; attracted the praise of Ruskin by his acanthus work on a candelabra; and was attracted by the advertising in British papers of American manufacturers who needed silversmiths. He left England the day after he had joined with several other craftsmen to form the Sheffield Society of Arts and Crafts. And, of course, he meant to come back.
Burns has something to say about the unreliability of human and mousy plans. The craftsman found employment in a silverware company in Concord, New Hampshire; left Concord to establish the hollow-ware department for a new factory in Gardner; left factory methods altogether to set up his own shop, not in England but in America. It began with one silversmith working by himself, had its discouragements, grew in spite of them, and is now a workshop of two stories, a master craftsman, and a small group of assistants. And the policy of this workshop is that the assistants are worthy of a better wage than they would receive under the usual commercial conditions;that they are entitled to share the profits; and that the one sure way to set and hold a standard of craftsmanship lies in a helpful goodfellowship between master and assistants. If you examine the product you will always find the initial of the craftsman who hammered it; behind that initial is the fact that Mr. Stone is the master hand with the hammer, and that many a hesitating shape has been brought to final grace by his own perfecting strokes. But it means little enough in print to say that the resulting shape departs subtly from the simple round or presents a charming variation from the simple oval. . . . The work must speak for itself to those who appreciate it: increase the number of them, and thus add materially to the more refined pleasures of living. The apostle spoon, with the apostle soldered to the handle, has gone out of fashion—one of them sold in 1902 for $3450—but I have a feeling that Mr. Stone is actively sending out apostles of taste in silver by his constant production of domestic silverware.
For that reason I am more interested in these domestic things than in such rarer and more lavishly beautiful objects as the golden pyx for the altar of the Church of the Advent in Boston, the loving cup presented to President Eliot on his seventieth birthday, or the altar vases with the golden bunches of grapes. But I am tempted to revive a bit of contemporary criticism of the Eliot cup to buttress what I have just been saying about the personal equation in the raising of metal. The design enlarged upon a Greek carchesium, or drinking cup of the early fifth century B.C. This Greek original was a piece of pottery, common at the time, which found its own suggestion in metal and was therefore a suitable form for retranslation. Of the Greek cup a discerning critic pointed out that the design embraced a scheme of proportion, critically termed the “golden section,” whose smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole: which is Greek to me, and probably to the reader. The point of interest is the same critic’s opinion that this scheme of proportion is not only preserved in Mr. Stone’s silver cup—but occurs more frequently. And this, in turn, was due to no definite determination of the silversmith to attain such and such mathematical proportions; rather it came from the individual sensitiveness to form that made the cup grow under his hands into a shape that critical examination might explain afterward by a formula deduced by studying the perfected work of earlier masters.
So, too, I can sense the pleasure that the craftsman took in the delicate and profuse ornamentation of the pyx (whose sacred purpose is to house the consecrated wafer in a noble dwelling), working in gold and diamonds, finishing tiny feathers in the wings of miniature praying angels, building Gothic pinnacles of gold, and persuading the precious metal to the form of little vines, leaves, and passion flowers: but I suspect that the man is happier, and more completely himself, when the work at hand has a simpler and more robust quality.
I have hinted at discouragements. Once, indeed, the silversmith turned his back on the craft, sold his tools, and was never going to have anything more to do with silver all the days of his life. He found other employment for his skill as a designer. But a few of the tools had not been sold: before long he was working in copper for his own pleasure, one of the results being a portrait of Joseph Jefferson as Rip: and not long after that he was again a silversmith. For Mr. Stone and the hammer are as inseparable in life as they are in the mark that identifies his silverware.
Source: House Beautiful - June 1915
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
A HANDSOME SILVER TROPHY
The Society of Arts and Crafts have placed on exhibition at the gallery, 9 Park street, a silver bowl which has just been made for Commodore R.T. Paine, 2d, of the Eastern Yacht Club. It is a notable specimen of the silversmith's art, and is the work of Arthur J. Stone. It is to be given Commodore Paine as the prize for first-class schooners in the Eastern Yacht Club cruise this summer. The bowl is about twelve inches high, with beautifully chased decorations, and is furnished with a ladle. It is one of the handsomest trophies which the Society of Arts and Crafts have made.
Source: Boston Evening Transcript - 3rd June 1913
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The Society of Arts and Crafts have placed on exhibition at the gallery, 9 Park street, a silver bowl which has just been made for Commodore R.T. Paine, 2d, of the Eastern Yacht Club. It is a notable specimen of the silversmith's art, and is the work of Arthur J. Stone. It is to be given Commodore Paine as the prize for first-class schooners in the Eastern Yacht Club cruise this summer. The bowl is about twelve inches high, with beautifully chased decorations, and is furnished with a ladle. It is one of the handsomest trophies which the Society of Arts and Crafts have made.
Source: Boston Evening Transcript - 3rd June 1913
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
EXHIBITION OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS & CRAFTS
COPLEY & ALLSTON HALLS, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
FEBRUARY 5th TO 26th 1907
The exhibits of Arthur J. Stone:
Stone, Arthur J., Gardner:
771 A. Oval water-pitcher - Designed and executed by Mr. Stone
772 B. Rose porringer
773 B. Oval box
774 B. Bowl with celtic ornament and peg handles
775 B. Punch-bowl
776 B. Cup, peg handles
777 B. Cup, three handles
778 B. Fruit tozza
779 B. Salad-bowl
780 B. Plate, ornamented with leaf and gold berries
781 B. Plate, hexagonal bottom
782 B. Round tray, to match salad-bowl
783 B. Milk-pitcher, intaglio rose
784 B. Copper vase, with silver rim and base - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and John Petty
785 B. Teaspoons, set of six, pointed handle
786 B. Five o'clock teaspoons, set of six, pointed handle
787 B. Coffee spoons, set of six, pointed handle
788 B. Sugar-tongs
789 B. Salad-fork and spoon
790 B. Salad-fork and spoon
791 B. Ladle for punch-bowl - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and George P. Blanchard
792 B. Loving cup. Lent by President Charles W. Eliot
793 B. Loving cup. Lent by Mr. Edward Hale Abbot - Designed by H. Langford Warren, executed by Mr. Stone
794 B. Gravy-spoon, fiddle back, line ornament - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and C. P. Blanchard
795 B. Four-piece silver tea-set: sugar, creamer and waste-bowl - Lent by Mrs. Lawrence Bullard - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and assistants
796 A. Copper bowl, silver rim and inlaid acorns - Designed and executed by Mr. Stone
797 A. Tray, chased leaf and gold inlaid berries. Lent by Mrs. Augusta Hemenway - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and John Petty
798 A. Tea-fork, pointed handle, line ornament - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and G. P. Blanchard
799 A. Silver fish-knife, ivory handle, perforated and chased. Reproduction of an old English piece. Lent by Mrs. Deane Pierce Executed by Mr. Stone
'A' signifies that the article was designed and executed by one craftsman from beginning to end.
'B' signifies that the article was designed or executed (or both) by not more than two craftsmen, whose names are given, working under some form of collaboration.
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COPLEY & ALLSTON HALLS, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
FEBRUARY 5th TO 26th 1907
The exhibits of Arthur J. Stone:
Stone, Arthur J., Gardner:
771 A. Oval water-pitcher - Designed and executed by Mr. Stone
772 B. Rose porringer
773 B. Oval box
774 B. Bowl with celtic ornament and peg handles
775 B. Punch-bowl
776 B. Cup, peg handles
777 B. Cup, three handles
778 B. Fruit tozza
779 B. Salad-bowl
780 B. Plate, ornamented with leaf and gold berries
781 B. Plate, hexagonal bottom
782 B. Round tray, to match salad-bowl
783 B. Milk-pitcher, intaglio rose
784 B. Copper vase, with silver rim and base - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and John Petty
785 B. Teaspoons, set of six, pointed handle
786 B. Five o'clock teaspoons, set of six, pointed handle
787 B. Coffee spoons, set of six, pointed handle
788 B. Sugar-tongs
789 B. Salad-fork and spoon
790 B. Salad-fork and spoon
791 B. Ladle for punch-bowl - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and George P. Blanchard
792 B. Loving cup. Lent by President Charles W. Eliot
793 B. Loving cup. Lent by Mr. Edward Hale Abbot - Designed by H. Langford Warren, executed by Mr. Stone
794 B. Gravy-spoon, fiddle back, line ornament - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and C. P. Blanchard
795 B. Four-piece silver tea-set: sugar, creamer and waste-bowl - Lent by Mrs. Lawrence Bullard - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and assistants
796 A. Copper bowl, silver rim and inlaid acorns - Designed and executed by Mr. Stone
797 A. Tray, chased leaf and gold inlaid berries. Lent by Mrs. Augusta Hemenway - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and John Petty
798 A. Tea-fork, pointed handle, line ornament - Designed by Mr. Stone, executed by Mr. Stone and G. P. Blanchard
799 A. Silver fish-knife, ivory handle, perforated and chased. Reproduction of an old English piece. Lent by Mrs. Deane Pierce Executed by Mr. Stone
'A' signifies that the article was designed and executed by one craftsman from beginning to end.
'B' signifies that the article was designed or executed (or both) by not more than two craftsmen, whose names are given, working under some form of collaboration.
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
Arthur J. Stone - Gardner, Mass. - 1907
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The above illustration shows how effectively hand wrought objects can be used in setting a table for display purposes. The flat silver and the candlesticks were made by Arthur J. Stone, the dean of contemporary American silversmiths, and the fluted compotes are by F. J. Gyllenberg. The plates are decorated in silver luster by Maude M. Mason, who is also famous for her paintings of flower subjects. The linen doylies are from the Calumet Industry, which is carried on by miners' wives under the guidance of Mrs. Rierson and Anna K. Fax. The hooked rug, displayed on the wall because it was part of a special exhibit, is the work of Martha Ross Titcomb who makes most of her designs, dyes her woolen and cotton materials, and hooks it through burlap in the olden way. The chairs are copies of ancient styles made by the Kensington Company. The Little Gallery, in New York, is noted for its constant showing of the work of our best craftsmen.
Source: The American Magazine of Art - August 1921
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An advertisement from the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts featuring the work of Arthur J. Stone:
The Society of Arts and Crafts - Boston - 1920
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The Society of Arts and Crafts - Boston - 1920
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Re: Arthur J. Stone - Further Information
An exhibition of the acme of craftsmanship had the patronage of a number of prominent ladies and was held on Wednesday in the New-Century Club parlors. All of the work was the product of some associate member of the Arts and Crafts Guild, of Philadelphia, and included Denison linens, the mountain white knotted spreads, reproductions of old pewter, hand weavings, hand-wrought silver and luster glass and china. This work is just one notch below the inspired art of the painter or musician. It would be hard to match in charm the beautiful luster ware of Mr. Syanlly T. Collowhill, or the pewter tea service of Mr. Lester Vaughn. The Denison linens are made in Boston, and are designed with a view to keeping alive the lovely Italian, Greek and Syrian embroideries. The hand-wrought blankets from the Tewfly looms and the hand-wrought silver of Mr. Arthur Stone were among tho best examples of these splendid crafts. For an age of machinery it is refreshing to view so many exquisite products of the hand loom, the needle and the mallet.
Source: The Delmarvia Star - 15th December 1918
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Source: The Delmarvia Star - 15th December 1918
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THE TESTIMONIAL TO WILHELM GERICKE, LEADER OF THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA - 1906
Testimonial to Mr. Gericke
When Wilhelm Gericke, leader of the Boston Symphony Orchestra mounted the conductor's stand to direct the programme on April 28. he saw by the bouquets of red and white roses, tied with red, white and black ribbons— the Austrian colors—which hung from the stand, and the festoon of laurel which bordered the stage that his last appearance in Boston. barring his evening's benefit for the San Francisco sufferers, was thoughtfully remembered. There wss no Idea, however, in his mind of what was to follow. The final number was, like all concluding selections, applauded enthusiastically; and the hand-clapping was continued while Mr. Gerlcke bowed several times. The demonstration did not cease even when he left the stage, and then It must have been clear to him that it was more than impersonal. Once again did he come forward and bow and then return "off stage." But the applause had not been Interrupted or diminished, and for a third time he stepped to the front. By this time the sliver vase and salver which his friends and admirers had prepared for him had been placed In the center of the stage. There, too. stood Henry M. Rogers, who was then ready to make the presentation speech. Not until Mr. Rogers' first word did the audience stop applauding. He said: "Ladies and Gentlemen— I have been requested to present to Mr. Gericke on the eve of his departure an expression of our grateful appreciation of all that he has done for us and for music In Boston during his residence among us. (Applause.) "We have come to the close of the 25th season of the Symphony concerts. For more than one-half of that time Mr. Gericke has striven to make good the ideals of the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who has made this occasion possible, (Applause ) "Without further preface, I ask your sympathetic co-operation with me in the presentation of our gift." At this point Mr. Rogers read to Mr. Gericke from the scroll, designed by Mr Gaugengigi as follows: "Mr. Gericke —We ask your acceptance of our gift as an expression of our gratitude, our esteem and our affection. In these simple words we would attest our recognition of your measureless service and the attendant brilliant results; of your consistent uplifting and upholding of the Ideal and of your widespread Influence for good, that will gather strength as time goes on. For years you have given entire devotion to the Boston Symphony Orchestra: Its noble record of achievement Is at once the history of its past and the Inspiration of Its future. "You carry with you the affectionate regard and best wishes of this community, and the heartiest Godspeed that can he uttered." (Applause.) When Mr. Rogers finished there was a renewal of the applause and It was continued while Mr, Rogers walked over to Mr. Gericke and shook his hand warmly and patted his shoulder several times. Mr Gericke bowed to Mr. Rogers and then stepped upon the conductor's stand In much the same way he does at the beginning of a concert. Turning directly to Mr Rogers, he made an acknowledgement of the gifts. What he said however, was lost to most of the audience, for as he spoke his head was turned sidewise. He said he fully appreciated the honor and took the opportunity to pay a high tribute to Major Hlgginson who, he said, was deserving of greater credit than anyone else. In conclusion, he thanked his audience and the members of the orchestra and then bowed again. The gathering of admirers was not satisfied to let It drop at that, but continued their applause until Mr. Gericke placed his right hand on his heart and bowed five or six times more. The vase and salver presented to Mr. Gericke are the work of Arthur J. Stone, of Gardner. Mass., from drawings by C. Howard Walker. The vase, which is 10¼ inches in height, is of simple form with a delicate scroll decoration upon the shoulder of the vase, in the center of which is the small figure of a winged Love with a baton, conducting. Around the neck of the vase In fine gold letters is the following Inscription: "To Wilhelm Gericke, in grateful appreciation from friends and admirers. Boston, April 28. 1906." The salver has as a border a wave pattern of laurel branches with the berries in gold upon the lines of the musical staff. The check, which is made In addition to the silver tribute, amounted to about $1,200. Many of Mr. Gericke's Cambridge admirers joined in the tribute. The following letter from Mr. Gericke explains itself: Brookline, April 30. 1906. Henry M. Rogers: Mr. Dear Mr. Rogers—l should like to express my heartfelt appreciation and gratitude through you to all whose names are signed on the scroll that accompanied the beautiful and truly artistic vase presented to me, together with a most generous token of good will, and, if I may say It, of affection. During my life In Boston I have often been made happy by assurance of private friendships, and I have often been deeply moved by the more than friendly disposition of the Symphony audiences toward me; but I was wholly unprepared for the tribute paid me last week, a tribute of which I wish I could feel I were more worthy. When I received the gifts in public, my feelings overcame me, and I knew that my few words were an inadequate expression of my thoughts. There were many things I wished to! say, but even now I hardly know how to say them. Believe me, I am truly grateful. The knowledge that the musical community and the public at large were so kindly disposed toward me will be a deep and abiding pleasure during my remaining years.
Yours faithfully, (Signed) WILHELM GERICKE.
Source: The Cambridge Tribune - 12th May 1906
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Testimonial to Mr. Gericke
When Wilhelm Gericke, leader of the Boston Symphony Orchestra mounted the conductor's stand to direct the programme on April 28. he saw by the bouquets of red and white roses, tied with red, white and black ribbons— the Austrian colors—which hung from the stand, and the festoon of laurel which bordered the stage that his last appearance in Boston. barring his evening's benefit for the San Francisco sufferers, was thoughtfully remembered. There wss no Idea, however, in his mind of what was to follow. The final number was, like all concluding selections, applauded enthusiastically; and the hand-clapping was continued while Mr. Gerlcke bowed several times. The demonstration did not cease even when he left the stage, and then It must have been clear to him that it was more than impersonal. Once again did he come forward and bow and then return "off stage." But the applause had not been Interrupted or diminished, and for a third time he stepped to the front. By this time the sliver vase and salver which his friends and admirers had prepared for him had been placed In the center of the stage. There, too. stood Henry M. Rogers, who was then ready to make the presentation speech. Not until Mr. Rogers' first word did the audience stop applauding. He said: "Ladies and Gentlemen— I have been requested to present to Mr. Gericke on the eve of his departure an expression of our grateful appreciation of all that he has done for us and for music In Boston during his residence among us. (Applause.) "We have come to the close of the 25th season of the Symphony concerts. For more than one-half of that time Mr. Gericke has striven to make good the ideals of the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who has made this occasion possible, (Applause ) "Without further preface, I ask your sympathetic co-operation with me in the presentation of our gift." At this point Mr. Rogers read to Mr. Gericke from the scroll, designed by Mr Gaugengigi as follows: "Mr. Gericke —We ask your acceptance of our gift as an expression of our gratitude, our esteem and our affection. In these simple words we would attest our recognition of your measureless service and the attendant brilliant results; of your consistent uplifting and upholding of the Ideal and of your widespread Influence for good, that will gather strength as time goes on. For years you have given entire devotion to the Boston Symphony Orchestra: Its noble record of achievement Is at once the history of its past and the Inspiration of Its future. "You carry with you the affectionate regard and best wishes of this community, and the heartiest Godspeed that can he uttered." (Applause.) When Mr. Rogers finished there was a renewal of the applause and It was continued while Mr, Rogers walked over to Mr. Gericke and shook his hand warmly and patted his shoulder several times. Mr Gericke bowed to Mr. Rogers and then stepped upon the conductor's stand In much the same way he does at the beginning of a concert. Turning directly to Mr Rogers, he made an acknowledgement of the gifts. What he said however, was lost to most of the audience, for as he spoke his head was turned sidewise. He said he fully appreciated the honor and took the opportunity to pay a high tribute to Major Hlgginson who, he said, was deserving of greater credit than anyone else. In conclusion, he thanked his audience and the members of the orchestra and then bowed again. The gathering of admirers was not satisfied to let It drop at that, but continued their applause until Mr. Gericke placed his right hand on his heart and bowed five or six times more. The vase and salver presented to Mr. Gericke are the work of Arthur J. Stone, of Gardner. Mass., from drawings by C. Howard Walker. The vase, which is 10¼ inches in height, is of simple form with a delicate scroll decoration upon the shoulder of the vase, in the center of which is the small figure of a winged Love with a baton, conducting. Around the neck of the vase In fine gold letters is the following Inscription: "To Wilhelm Gericke, in grateful appreciation from friends and admirers. Boston, April 28. 1906." The salver has as a border a wave pattern of laurel branches with the berries in gold upon the lines of the musical staff. The check, which is made In addition to the silver tribute, amounted to about $1,200. Many of Mr. Gericke's Cambridge admirers joined in the tribute. The following letter from Mr. Gericke explains itself: Brookline, April 30. 1906. Henry M. Rogers: Mr. Dear Mr. Rogers—l should like to express my heartfelt appreciation and gratitude through you to all whose names are signed on the scroll that accompanied the beautiful and truly artistic vase presented to me, together with a most generous token of good will, and, if I may say It, of affection. During my life In Boston I have often been made happy by assurance of private friendships, and I have often been deeply moved by the more than friendly disposition of the Symphony audiences toward me; but I was wholly unprepared for the tribute paid me last week, a tribute of which I wish I could feel I were more worthy. When I received the gifts in public, my feelings overcame me, and I knew that my few words were an inadequate expression of my thoughts. There were many things I wished to! say, but even now I hardly know how to say them. Believe me, I am truly grateful. The knowledge that the musical community and the public at large were so kindly disposed toward me will be a deep and abiding pleasure during my remaining years.
Yours faithfully, (Signed) WILHELM GERICKE.
Source: The Cambridge Tribune - 12th May 1906
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ARTS AND CRAFTS MEDALS OF MERIT
The Boston Society of Arts and Crafts held its Sixteenth Annual Meeting on the evening of February 19th in the hall of the Boston Architectural Club. This meeting was preceded by a supper attended by 125 members and guests and was specially notable on account of the award for the first time of the Society's bronze medals of merit. The recipients of these medals were I. Kirchmayer, woodcarver, of Cambridge; Arthur J. Stone, silversmith, of Gardner, Mass. and Henry C. Mercer, potter, of Doylestown, Pa. At the same time 29 of the craftsmen members were advanced to the grade of master in recognition of the excellence of their Work, and the following councillors were elected to serve for three years: Ralph Adams Cram, Louis C. Newhall, Mrs. F. A. Shaw, Arthur J. Stone, and H. Langford Warren.
The President of the Society is Professor H. Langford Warren of Harvard University. The Secretary and Treasurer is Mr. H. P. Macomber.
Source: Art and Progress - April 1913
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The Boston Society of Arts and Crafts held its Sixteenth Annual Meeting on the evening of February 19th in the hall of the Boston Architectural Club. This meeting was preceded by a supper attended by 125 members and guests and was specially notable on account of the award for the first time of the Society's bronze medals of merit. The recipients of these medals were I. Kirchmayer, woodcarver, of Cambridge; Arthur J. Stone, silversmith, of Gardner, Mass. and Henry C. Mercer, potter, of Doylestown, Pa. At the same time 29 of the craftsmen members were advanced to the grade of master in recognition of the excellence of their Work, and the following councillors were elected to serve for three years: Ralph Adams Cram, Louis C. Newhall, Mrs. F. A. Shaw, Arthur J. Stone, and H. Langford Warren.
The President of the Society is Professor H. Langford Warren of Harvard University. The Secretary and Treasurer is Mr. H. P. Macomber.
Source: Art and Progress - April 1913
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EXHIBITION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ART - BOSTON - 1909
A special exhibition of ecclesiastical art was opened on Monday at the gallery of the Society of Arts and Crafts, 9 Park street. The work shown is largely produced by members of St. Dunstan's Guild, an organization of members formed to further ecclesiastical art. The collection includes embroidery, metal-work, jewel-work, wood-carving, stained glass, illuminations, tapestry, etc. The piece-de-resistance is a magnificent gold and jewelled pyx, which is believed to be one of the richest pieces of goldsmith work ever made for ecclesiastical purposes in this country. This pyx was designed by Messrs. Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, and executed by Arthur J. Stone, who is well known as a silversmith. It is a presentation piece for the Church of Advent in this city. The details of the work are very elaborate, including many symbolic forms in relief, and one feature of particular beauty is a circle of praying angels' figures. The material is gold, and is richly set with diamonds and amethysts. So unusual is this work that it is attracting marked attention, and there are those who declare that no more exquisite goldsmiths' work has been seen since the days of Benvenuto Cellini.
Source: The Boston Evening Transcript - 31th March 1909
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A special exhibition of ecclesiastical art was opened on Monday at the gallery of the Society of Arts and Crafts, 9 Park street. The work shown is largely produced by members of St. Dunstan's Guild, an organization of members formed to further ecclesiastical art. The collection includes embroidery, metal-work, jewel-work, wood-carving, stained glass, illuminations, tapestry, etc. The piece-de-resistance is a magnificent gold and jewelled pyx, which is believed to be one of the richest pieces of goldsmith work ever made for ecclesiastical purposes in this country. This pyx was designed by Messrs. Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, and executed by Arthur J. Stone, who is well known as a silversmith. It is a presentation piece for the Church of Advent in this city. The details of the work are very elaborate, including many symbolic forms in relief, and one feature of particular beauty is a circle of praying angels' figures. The material is gold, and is richly set with diamonds and amethysts. So unusual is this work that it is attracting marked attention, and there are those who declare that no more exquisite goldsmiths' work has been seen since the days of Benvenuto Cellini.
Source: The Boston Evening Transcript - 31th March 1909
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