FOR TIFFANY & CO., NEW YORK, SECOND HALF 20TH CENTURY

Van Day Truex (1904 - 1979) served at Tiffany & Co.'s design director from 1956-79. Before joining Tiffany, he was an art professor at the Parson's School of Design in Paris. Truex cared little for the austere Art Deco designs, which he found contrived and 'pointlessly grasping at the retreating shadows of eighteenth-century opulence' (J. Loring, Magnificent Tiffany Silver, New York, 2001, p 250). Not unlike Edward C. Moore, Truex found his inspiration in nature, and was quoted in the New York Herald Tribune as saying 'Every designer should take himself to the [Natural History] Museum and look at the bugs and the butterflies and shells. Nature is still the best designer'. In the same article the Tribune notes of Truex '...when it comes to the question of taste he's splendidly opinionated, emphatically outspoken and dead right' and further 'He's for positive designs, whether they're plain or elaborate, that are personal and look as though they were made for an individual rather than for the statistics on mass taste' (8 December 1960).
Truex designed the firm's famous Bamboo pattern flatware, which was introduced in 1960 and won an International Design award. An advertisement showcasing a similarly naturalistically designed 'Strawberry Box' bearing a spray of yellow wildflowers, originally published in House & Garden magazine, is reproduced in J. Loring, Tiffany's 20th Century A Portrait of American Style, New York, 1997, pp. 160-162. A group of four silver-gilt examples of these 'strawberry boxes' were sold at Christie's, New York, 17-18 January 2019, lot 859 ($37,500).