The New York firm Marcus & Co. (1892–1942) created exceptional jewelry for an art-loving, wealthy elite. Travels throughout India in 1895 inspired their first distinctive body of design, featuring elaborate gold and colored stone jewels. In the following years, annual visits to the Paris Salons and encounters with the work of Lalique, Colonna, and Vever resulted in an original response to the Art Nouveau style. In this talk, Sheila Barron Smithie and Beth Carver Wees—coauthors of the new book Marcus & Co.: Three Generations of New York Jewelers—will focus on their turn-of-the-century work, produced under the leadership of the family’s second generation, highlighting the firm’s body of extraordinary plique-à-jour enamel jewelry. Surviving objects and archival drawings from two sources reveal new aspects of the firm’s history.
Paul Hollister (1918–2004) was a pioneering critic of contemporary studio glass and a glass historian. Irene Hollister (1920–2016) was a philanthropist, advocate for glass scholarship, and founding administrator of the Association for Computing Machinery. The Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass were established at Bard Graduate Center in 2007.
Sheila Barron Smithie, FGA, has been a jewelry specialist, researcher, and appraiser at auction houses and galleries. She is a Fellow of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain (FGA) and the recipient of its 2005 Christie’s Prize. As an adjunct faculty member at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, she designed and taught the course Gems and Jewelry: History and Markets for master’s degree students. From 2013, she consulted on jewelry for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helping to research the institution-wide collection for the 2018 exhibition Jewelry: The Body Transformed. Beginning her early career as a financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co., she worked in investment banking, commodities, and equity research sales and trading in New York, Mexico City, and London. She is a graduate of Harvard University.
Beth Carves Wees is curator emerita, the American Wing, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where for twenty years she oversaw the collections of American silver, jewelry, and other metalwork. Prior to joining the Met’s staff in 2000, she was curator of decorative arts at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She lectures internationally and is the author of numerous articles and books, including English, Irish & Scottish Silver at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (1997) and Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013). Beth holds degrees in art history from Smith College and from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. An alumna of the Attingham Summer School and Royal Collection Studies, she currently serves as President of the Board of the American Friends of Attingham. She also sits on the advisory boards of the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts and of the Silver Society in England. Beth was one of six organizing curators for the Met’s 2018–19 exhibition Jewelry: The Body Transformed as well as a contributor to its catalogue. Her exhibition Jewelry for America was on view at the Met from June 2019 to May 2021.
