by Nicole Arcieri
When thinking of Tiffany & Co., Audrey Hepburn, luxury jewelry and breakfast come to mind. But you can’t consider Tiffany & Co. without discussing Edward Chandler Moore, the man who led the company to revolutionary heights and timeless success in silver design during the second half of the 19th century. Moore is on the Hastings Historical Society’s list of notable residents, although he lived here for only a short period of time.
E. C. Moore was born in 1827 to Margaret Gale and John C. Moore. His father was a silversmith who started his own business in the trade in 1836. In 1849, when he was 22, Edward began working alongside his father at John C. Moore & Son in Manhattan. Edward would eventually take over his father’s business.
In 1851, John was hired by Charles L. Tiffany, the owner of Tiffany & Co., to produce their silverware. John’s company became the primary manufacturer of Tiffany silver and about 20 years later, Charles purchased John’s firm and named him one of the directors of Tiffany & Co. In Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co., Medill Higgins Harvey notes that these companies successfully withstood several recessionary periods throughout the 1830s and 1840s as well as the Panic of 1857. She also notes that during the Civil War, the Moore firm was transformed into a showroom of sorts, as the company began to sell military wares.
Edward eventually became the chief designer and vice president of Tiffany & Co. and, at one point, he led a team of about 500 people. In The Jewelry and Enamels of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Janet Zapata writes that Edward was on the Board of Directors of Tiffany & Co. and she notes that from 1851 to 1868, “…the silverware Moore produced was designed in the conventional revival styles of the period, such as chinoiserie, rococo, Renaissance, and neoclassical.” However, once Tiffany & Co. purchased John C. Moore & Co., Edward’s designs greatly evolved.
Upon amassing a vast art collection and traveling the world, Edward became enamored of Eastern art. Zapata notes that Edward’s collection came to include books on Persian, Arabic and Japanese art. This influence was apparent in his later work at Tiffany & Co. In The Art of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Tessa Paul writes that Edward once invited a team of Japanese metal craftsmen to New York to collaborate with designers at Tiffany & Co. Although Edward was greatly inspired by cultures outside of his own, he did not copy designs outright; rather, he added his own artistic touch to the objects he produced.
Edward was a very private person and, in keeping with the company tradition of maintaining designer anonymity, most of his work was credited to Tiffany & Co., says Zapata. There was one exception, however. Zapata writes that Edward took ownership of his drawings of presentation swords sketched after the Civil War and of nine flatware patterns he designed, one of which he called Tiffany.
And although Edward generally kept to himself, he became an informal instructor to apprentices within the company. The system of artistic training he established later came to be known as the “Tiffany School” and it is likely that Louis Comfort Tiffany was one of his first pupils. Edward kept a vast collection of books and artistic objects and encouraged his pupils to do the same, and to take inspiration from such materials and from nature itself, says Zapata.
Due to his professional success, Edward lived a comfortable life and was well-positioned in society. He was married to Mary Pethick and they had six children, some of whom grew up to hold important positions at Tiffany & Co., notes Harvey. In 1860, he and his family moved from Brooklyn to Yonkers. According to an article written by former Hastings Historical Society trustee Eileen Forbes-Watkins, the Moores lived at 298 North Broadway in Yonkers for a little over three decades. A year before Edward’s death, Edward and his family moved to a stately estate in Hastings-on-Hudson, which had been owned by Jehial Read, a prosperous Manhattan merchant. The house, still standing, was made of local dolomite marble and is today known locally as the Read-Moore House.
The majority of the Moore family is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. According to the Office for Metropolitan History, Tiffany & Co. had won major awards and had become the most internationally respected American silver manufacturer upon Edwards’s death in 1891.
Edward’s library and personal artistic collection were gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In The Tiffany Standard, Christopher Hemphill writes that 70 silver objects designed under Edward’s direction at the company and a total of 2,500 Eastern objects that he collected were also donated to the Met.
In Arts Orientalis, Marilyn Jenkins Madina says “…it is clear that Moore was a…private individual who was not easy to know…he passed through life without assuming in the eyes of the general public the credit he so well deserved…the world will never fully know the loss it met with in the death of Mr. Moore….” While Edward never achieved significant fame in his lifetime, he has in fact gone down in history as arguably the most innovative silver designer at Tiffany & Co.
The image of a silversmith at work, featured at the beginning of this post, is courtesy of StockCake: https://stockcake.com.
Nicole Arcieri is a volunteer at the Hastings Historical Society and a historic tour guide at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. She graduated from CUNY Hunter College with a BA in Media Studies and Anthropology.
