Gorham Manufacturing Company

Looking as if they were plucked from the nearby Narragansett Bay, these salad servers are encrusted with shells, sand, crabs, and strands of seaweed tangled with fish. Rhode Island’s waters and marine life so inspired the designers of the Gorham Manufacturing Company that the anchor from the state seal was adopted as part of the Gorham maker’s mark.

Fish jump from the roiling ocean of the tureen’s surface, with the handles resembling knobby branches of coral, on which a pair of crabs rests. Realism like that seen in the tureen’s sea-urchin finial was often achieved through live casts of sea creatures.