Chocolate Pot
Tiffany & Co.
Designed by Charles Osborne
The luminous red surface of this vessel, evoking Asian lacquer and ceramic glazes, established a new paradigm for silverwares. Tiffany records indicate that "Chocolate Pot Big Belly" was offered in two versions, the one seen here and another in silver with copper, gold, and "yellow metal" decoration. With a wholesale cost of $175, the copper version was more than twice as expensive to produce. The firm’s technical manual documents the painstaking experimentation undertaken to achieve red surfaces. References to Japanese sources include the inlaid silver pattern on the neck, which resembles the auspicious shippō pattern, as seen in a seventeenth-century incense box earlier in this exhibition, and the applied silver and gold kirimon (paulownia-tree crest), the emblem of the Japanese government.
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