Ice Cream Dish from Mackay Service

Upon descending a mine shaft to view the first major discovery of silver ore in the United States, at the Comstock Lode, Marie Louise Hungerford Mackay is said to have asked her husband, one of the mine’s owners, for enough silver to make a dinner service "by the finest silversmith in the country." John William Mackay proceeded to ship half a ton of silver to Tiffany & Co., where a lavish dinner and dessert service of more than 1,250 pieces was fashioned by several hundred craftspeople over the course of two years. The chased silver hollowware, matching flatware, and gilded and enameled dessert service—the firm’s first foray into enameling—display technical virtuosity and inventive design philosophies. Tiffany records define "Mackay style" as a "mixture of . . . Chinese, Japanese, Persian & Arabian character," a hybrid aggregation of sources that typifies the creative process Moore promoted. The service, en route to the Mackays’ palatial Paris home, was displayed with great fanfare at the 1878 Paris Exposition. For John, who had arrived in America as an impoverished Irish child, and Marie, whose seamstress mother had attended to the dresses of New York society ladies, the service attested to an ascent from rags to riches, signaling affluence and sophistication.