“Reflecting Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver

The “Reflecting Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver has objects such as dinner sets, ships, horses and sculptures made from silver and at different times. The objects are from the 16^th century to the 19^th century. As I look through the objects and read about when they were made, I noticed that different cultures had very different style and there was a certain degree of ornamentation in each culture or region. At first, I hypothesized that in the 16^th century, dinner utensils such as plates, spoons, cups and teapots would have a high amount of ornamentation and that as time passes and moving toward the present, there would be less decorations because society was moving to a modern design. However, I was wrong; this exhibition does not show a correlation between time and level of ornamentation. Instead, ornamentation is correlated with region and culture. For example, I compared the Irish, Russian, and American dinner sets and focused on the level of ornamentation of these dinner sets. I observed that the American style was very simple relative to the Russian and Irish because it lacked patterns on the silverware. Irish style had more patterns and carvings on the silverware and the shapes and forms of the objects were very unique. The Russian, I thought valued ornamentation because there was a lot of it around the plate. Much detail was on the teapot and what I believe to be a goblet on the bottom right corner. In Russian style, there is even color such as the teapot and the pitcher that are blue and also have designs and patterns on them.

I think that comparing these three cultures, this collection related to design culture which is that design culture “contains things of the mind: plans, dreams, utopias, fears…” (Lecture 1). Design culture displays what the designer values. Applying this to silverware, the Russians seemed to value ornamentation more than the Irish and the Americans because they obviously put a lot of effort into making the dinner sets, which means that they found ornamentation worth that much time and effort.