c. 1882

Dinner Platter

The porcelain service ordered by First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes in 1879 was a radical departure from previous White House dinnerware. Instead of the gilt borders and Great Seal of the United States that previous designers had employed, Theodore Davis provided 130 dramatic images of American fauna and flora, including the wild turkey seen on this platter. Haviland & Co. used a combination of chromolithography and hand coloring to realize Davis’s vivid designs. The service proved so expensive to manufacture that Haviland negotiated the right to sell replicas to the public for seven years after delivering the original service to the White House in 1880. This platter was sold in New York by Haviland in 1882, with the warranty that it was “an exact duplicate of the piece made for the U.S. Government . . . and is equal to the original in every respect.”