Bottle slider

Status

Not on view

Label Text

Bottle sliders, or "coasters," permitted diners to easily move wine bottles across a table and refill their own glasses, while preventing damage to the table's wood surface. With its orderly pierced bands, perfectly symmetrical flowers, and neatly engraved festoons, Washington's silver plated bottle slider- likely one of eight he asked Lafayette to purchase for him in France in October 1783 - smartly updated his dinner table to the internationally popular neoclassical style.

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Datec. 1783

Geography Probably made - England

Medium/TechniqueFused silverplate on copper, wood, ivory

DimensionsOverall: 1 3/8 in. x 5 in. x 5 in. (3.51 cm x 12.7 cm x 12.7 cm)

Credit LineAcquired through the generosity of the Ammerman Family Foundation in memory of Bruce Ammerman, 2008

Object numberW-2553

DescriptionCoaster formed of a strip of fused, double plated silver on copper, seamed to form a circular gallery around a wooden base; pierced sides featuring two bands of a pierced, chevron-like design enclosing six, equidistant circles separated by festoons of bellflowers; five of the circles are pierced with eight-petaled flowers, the sixth is blank; die-stamped decoration in imitation of bright-cut and wrigglework engraving; drawn, stepped fused silverplate on copper bands applied around outside of rim and base; lathe-turned wooden base incised with a series of sixteen concentric circles on the obverse, around a .25" ivory button inserted at the center; reverse of wooden base has one deeply gouged ring just inside the outer edge.
Published ReferencesMessing, Christine H., John B. Rudder, and Diane Windham Shaw, "A Son and his Adoptive Father: The Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington (Mount Vernon, VA: Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, 2006), 67.

Martha Gandy Fales, "The Silver," The Magazine Antiques 135/2 (February 1989): 521.

Kathryn C. Buhler, Mount Vernon Silver (Mount Vernon, Virginia: Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 1957), 37-42, 69.

Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of George Washington as First President of the United States. Committee on Art and Exhibition, Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Portraits, Relics, and Silverware Exhibited at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, April 17th to May 8th, 1889 (New York: Trow's Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1889), #350, 81.

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