The tiger cowrie or Cypraea tigris - from the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific region - was highly valued in the late Renaissance both for its beauty (colours, dotted pattern, and porcelain-like glossy surface) and rarity, taking pride of place in princely collections. Spoons with their bowls made from cowrie shells were used for special purposes, for taking medicine or as poison detectors (not unlike some prized hardstones, bezoars and rhinoceros horn), and it has been suggested that since the cowrie shell is invulnerable to oxidation, spoon bowls made from it were used to eat caviar and seafood. The present spoon, with its bowl made from a thin section of a tiger cowrie shell, features a prismatic silver shaft, triangular in section and a finely chased terminal in the shape of an animal hoof. Silver “hoof spoons”, as these are called, are rare and some have been identified with the work of American Jewish silversmiths of Dutch origin working in colonial NewYork.One such silversmith, Ahasuerus Hendricks (†1727) made a silver “hoof spoon” (16.5 cm in length) from around 1680-1700 now in theYale University Art Gallery, New Haven (inv. no. 1942.351). It is possible that Hendricks, born in Albany and among the earliest known New York silversmiths, was responsible for our tiger cowrie spoon, not only given the similarities between both pieces but also because of an engraved inscription (in an elegant calligraphic script) on one side of the back of the shaft which runs from the bowl towards the cast hoof- shaped finial: “Soro (?) ∙ Heijndricks de Gros f[ecit] 1663”, or “made by Soro. (?, slightly effaced) Hendricks de Gros 1663”. Ahasuerus is, not surprisingly, a biblical name, currently identified with that of the Persian king Xerxes I, which derives from the Hebrew ’A ašew r š, a personal name that in Dutch becomes Ahsoros. Therefore, it is possible that the first word engraved on the shaft is an abbreviation for Ahasuerus / Ah- soros, given the presence of the dot. In any case this spoon would be the earliest known piece made by Hendricks, who is thought to have been born around 1650 and whose activity as silversmith is documented between ca. 1675-1727. Examples of “hoof spoons” from the Old World also include the fine example made in Amsterdam in 1650, a period of decline for such pieces, since “hoof spoons” remained in fashion in Holland until about 1660, when spoons with grotesque figures for terminals replaced them.
Several examples of tiger cowrie shells mounted as spoons exist in European museum collections and mention should be made of two sixteenth-century examples from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. no. 2345-1855, and 1258-1872.The first, from around 1530- 1540, has a silver-gilt handle and was probably made in Germany (or Switzerland), while the second, from around 1550 also with silver-gilt mounts and made in Austria, features a section of the seashell’s inner lip as the handle. One other example of a tiger cowrie spoon with silver mounts belongs to the collection of the Museo de San Francisco, Medina de Rioseco (Spain) at the old Franciscan monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza.
This tiger cowrie shell, mounted in silver as a small cup or saltcellar with the ventral side upwards on a raised pedestal, is decorated on the rim with a waved band, that would have covered the whole of the shell opening, and which replicates in silver its tooth-like serrations. Probably from the mid-seventeenth century, the mountings feature an embossed mask on one side and a stylised acanthus leaf on the other. Seventeenth-century objects made from whole tiger cowrie shells and set with silver mounts are known, of which two matching nutmeg graters should be mentioned from around 1690, one from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 588-2008, and the other from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
