Antique Tiffany Sterling Spoon – Japanese Audubon Pattern, Pat. 1871 & "m" Mark, Edward C. Moore Japonisme, No Monogram, New York 1870s

A sterling teaspoon in Tiffany's Japanese pattern, the design reissued in 1956 as Audubon. A long-tailed bird comes down open-winged across the handle into star flowers and chrysanthemum wheels, reed stems crossing behind on a matted ground. The reverse carries a different subject entirely, and the plain reserve where a monogram would go was never engraved.

Everything asked of the die-cutter went into the handle, front and back. Nothing is centred and nothing repeats; the weight sits low and left and the space above the wing is left empty, which is a Japanese habit of design and was not an American one in 1871. Turn it over for three fan-shaped tufts of pine, a feathered spray up the neck, a trefoil bud, chased shallower than the front but chased. The handle gathers into a bundle of reeds bound at the middle, and a chrysanthemum opens over the back of the bowl, its petals radiating from a single raised bead with a curled bud beneath. The bowl itself is left plain.

Four marks run along the handle back: a small Old English m, then TIFFANY & CO., STERLING, PAT. 1871. Only the nineteenth-century pieces carry the patent stamp. The m is the director's letter, used in this form of mark until the mid-eighteen-seventies, so letter and patent together put the spoon within four or five years of the pattern's release.

Edward C. Moore walked through the Japanese display at the Paris Exposition of 1867 and became Tiffany's chief silver designer the year after. Japanese was the patent he took out in 1871, the first Japonisme flatware made in America. He had eight birds cut and combined at random, so scarcely two pieces in a service repeat — which is why this pattern is collected by the single piece.