Cream pot (Cream jug)

Description

Tiffany’s lead designer and creative force for metalwork during the 1870s, Edward C. Moore, sought inspiration from global arts including those newly available to audiences of international expositions and fairs. Arts of the Islamic world, well-represented in his own collection by Syrian and Iraqi metalwork and ceramics, helped inform the abstracted chased and engraved surfaces on this beverage service. This early expression of what became called Tiffany’s “Persian” style, clearly a synthesis of Moore’s creativity, was appealing to a New York bride, Mary Pauline Foster, who married Henry Algernon du Pont in 1874. Her initials are engraved in a surprisingly rococo, foliated script within geometric reserves on the bodies of the service.