One of the most impressive objects in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vase commissioned from Tiffany & Company by the directors of the American Cotton Oil Company. The directors presented the vase to Edward Dean Adams, their chairman of the board, in 1895. Adams had worked long hours without pay to save the company from going under. For the directors to be able to afford this vase must mean that Adams was darn successful.

Tiffany artist Paulding Farnham designed the vase, which a small army of craftsmen fabricated from gold, semiprecious stones, and enamel between 1893 and 1895. The vase is 19″ inches high. It’s shaped as a classic vase, an inverted bell tapering down to a thin stem set upon an elaborate base. Two gem-studded handles rise from the stem to arch exuberantly over the bowl. The body of the vase is an amazing piece of goldsmithing: Mythological creatures emerge in various degrees of relief from what seems a sea of molten gold. The base features fully modeled human figures seated among animals, all in gold upon a white-enameled floor. Up top, a gold garland, suspended from the mouths of golden birds, rings the bowl.

I can’t make heads or tails of the symbolism, and apparently I’m not alone, for Tiffany had to produce an accompanying book explaining it all. I take it on faith that it all relates the history of the American Cotton Oil Company.

Who was Adams? A native Bostonian, Adams was both an engineer and a financier. He was one of those Adamses, a descendant of the two presidents. At the time of the vase, he lived at 455 Madison Avenue, one of the six “Villard houses” between 50th and 51st Streets. (Adams assisted Henry Villard, the developer of the houses, in running the Northern Pacific Railroad.) Those six houses became five when two were combined in the 1920s. When Harry Helmsley built the Palace Hotel in the early 1980s, he preserved three of the five houses. Adams’s, alas, was one of the two to go, its site now occupied by the hotel’s lobby. Stanford White designed the house’s interiors, which from photos appear remarkable. Adams collected art that he displayed in this house, including paintings by George Inness and Winslow Homer. I do not know if he ever displayed the vase in this house, or did so in Rohallion, his McKim, Mead & White-designed country house in Rumson, N.J. We do know that he gave the vase to the Met in 1904, 27 years before he died in an automobile accident, at the age of 85.

His greatest achievement was in coming up with the idea of harnessing the power of Niagara Falls for electrical generation and seeing the project through to completion in 1895. He was a Met trustee, ran the American Committee for Devastated France, and founded Deutsches House at Columbia. He was, in short, the type of the peripatetic patrician to whom any number of people or institutions might owe the debt of the Met’s most stupendous vase.

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