Gorham Manufacturing Company

This hammered copper coffee pot follows a Turkish form while its applied silver designs recall Katsushika Hokusai’s Manga, a collection of the artist’s sketches of Japanese flora, fauna, and figures, known to be part of the Gorham Manufacturing Company’s design library. The array of exotic wares displayed at world’s fairs in the late 19th-century helped fuel the mainstream development of the American Aesthetic movement, which eschewed popular historicized revivalism in favor of Japanese and other design influences, and American Orientalism, a style reflecting a Western construct of the “Orient,” a nebulous geographic location including Moorish, Indian, Islamic, Near Eastern, and Persian lands.