| The Silver Cup |
Taken from: The Davis Cup: Celebrating 100 Years of International Tennis
Author: Richard Evans
Copyright: The International Tennis Federation 1999
Dwight's Pot
If you had money to burn in Boston at the turn of the century, you headed for the smart striped awnings of Shreve, Crump Low Co. at the corner of Tremont and West Streets. A silver brooch for m'lady? A silver tea pot? No problem.
 | | Dwight's Pot |
Sporting trophies were often on sale, too, as Dwight Davis would have known when he placed the order for a cup to be made for an international tennis competition. Shreve's did not make it themselves, of course, but they dealt with only the most exclusive manufacturers and selected a firm in Concord, just across the New Hampshire border, the William B. Durgin Company.
Not nearly as large a concern as Tiffany's, Durgin's were, nonetheless, renowned for the quality of their products. Old William Durgin wanted nothing to do with new fangled ideas, like silver plating other, less precious metals. He dealt exclusively in the best - solid silver. Although the son of a New Hampshire farmer, Durgin became known as something of an Anglophile in as much as he recruited many of his staff from England.
In fact, in 1887 he travelled to England himself and advertised for craftsmen and designers. One of those who replied was a 22-year-old from Newcastle-under-Lyme called Rowland Rhodes. Already a graduate of what was to become the Royal College of Art, Rhodes had returned north to teach in Preston when he read of Durgin's offer - ten dollars a week and passage paid.
That was all the incentive this adventurous young man needed. After two years working in Concord, he was off, back across the Atlantic to Paris where he worked as a labourer in a foundry to familiarise himself with the techniques of metal casting. Then he enrolled at the Julien Academy and, before returning to Durgin's, was sufficiently successful to have one of his life-size plaster works, 'Youth's First Recognition of Love' exhibited at the Grand Salon in Paris in 1892.
Obviously a man of considerable talent, the red-bearded Englishman quickly made his mark back in Concord. To celebrate Grover Cleveland's election as President, silver manufacturers were invited to submit designs for the new White House silverware. Rhodes won the honour for Durgin's with his intricate Chrysanthemum pattern. By now Rhodes was anxious to have his own studio and, in 1893, he came to an amicable arrangement with his employer that enabled him to move to New York and work half the week at Durgin's Manhattan establishment and half at his own studio on East 13th Street.
But customers for sculpture during President Cleveland's administration were rare. Rhodes might have ensured that the President's table glittered for White House dinners but most ordinary folk were happy that their own table simply had food on it. Money was scarce and, after two years, Rhodes was forced to return to Concord where a patient fiancee finally got her wandering beau to walk up the aisle.
However marriage did not quell the Englishman's wanderlust and there were plans to work and study in Italy as the new century approached. But hard as he worked to improve as a sculptor and engraver, it was the order Durgin's received from a certain Dwight Davis for a silver trophy that would prove to be Rowland Rhodes's enduring masterpiece.
In retrospect, one can only commend Shreve's decision to choose Durgin's as manufacturers of the cup for the fashion of the time leaned towards the kind of flamboyance that could have turned Dwight's little pot into an ornament of laughable extremes. One tennis trophy made for High Rock Club in New York State was based on the Last of the Mohicans, complete with Indian war feathers decorating the rim. That sort of thing could have meant the demise of the Davis Cup.
Instead Rhodes opted for a design of classical restraint that will be admired at the end of this new century as warmly as it was at the start of the last.
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