Donald Colflesh Sterling Silver Circa '70 Coffee and Tea Service for Gorham

• MAKER : Gorham
• STYLE : Mid-Century Modern
• AGE : Post-1940
• BRAND : Gorham
• PATTERN : Circa '70
• COMPOSITION : Sterling Silver

Superb, Iconic, "Circa '70" Modernist Sterling silver coffee and tea set by Donald Colflesh, designed and manufactured by Gorham in 1958. Sterling silver and ebony, five piece set includes coffee pot, teapot, creamer, covered sugar bowl, and round oversized tray. It is not monogrammed and is in excellent condition. There are some very minor scratches on the underside of the pieces and on the Formica center of the tray, to commensurate with age. Fully hallmarked. The tray is particularly impressive with large, unique, space-age Mid-century handles. The pieces are dramatically sculptural and exquisitely well proportioned. Museum quality.
Dimensions weight:

Coffee pot: 29.9 × 18.4 × 14.6 cm (11 3/4 × 7 1/4 × 5 3/4 in.), #1461, 3 PINT, 34 troy ounces.

Teapot: 23.5 × 17.2 × 14.9 cm (9 1/4 × 6 3/4 × 5 7/8 in.), #1462, 2 1/4 PINT, 29 troy ounces.

Sugar bowl: 7.6 × 16.5 × 12.4 cm (3 × 6 1/2 × 4 7/8 in.), #1463, 11.4 troy ounces.

Creamer: 16.5 × 9.5 × 9.2 cm (6 1/2 × 3 3/4 × 3 5/8 in.), #1464, 12 troy ounces.

Tray: 3.8 × 45.7 × 45.7 cm (1 1/2 × 18 × 18 in.), #1468 - not weighed due to Formica center.

Date:
Designed 1958 introduced 1960
Pieces have Gorham date stamp for 1960.
Artist:
Donald Colflesh
American, born 1932
Made by Gorham Manufacturing Company (founded 1831)
Providence, Rhode Island
About:
In 1956 Gorham Manufacturing Company, the country’s leading maker and retailer of fashionable silver, recruited Donald Colflesh to bring a “contemporary dimension” to its traditional products. Colflesh’s most popular and successful design for the firm was the Circa ’70 series, in which he brilliantly captured America’s ambition to go the moon. In this coffee service, the intersecting angles epitomize the era of space-age design, and the curving, upright thrust of the handles and spouts conveys the aerodynamics of the jet age. Gorham reinforced the coffee service’s space-age associations in accompanying pamphlets, noting its “feeling of vertical motion … the upward look to space.” The company’s name for the line, Circa ’70, also confidently alludes to the future and its possibilities. The sleek contours and elongated ebony finials and handles, however, were exceptional for mid-century hollowware and recall similar embellishments on early-20th-century Scandinavian silver.
Literature:
Jewel Stern, Modernism in American Silver, exhibition catalogue, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2005, pp. 260-261, fig. 13.9 for an identical example - two page illustration.
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