CINCINNATI -- A gold-and-silver Tiffany pitcher that dates to Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration in 1861 is to be auctioned next month and could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The pitcher, presumably a gift to Lincoln, is the feature item to be auctioned in Cincinnati on June 6. The pitcher is expected to fetch $300,000 to $400,000, but experts have no comparative sale on which to base their estimate.
"With this, there is no other one," Wes Cowan of Cowan's Auction, who will handle the auction, told The Cincinnati Enquirer.
The pitcher has been owned by a Cincinnati family that Cowan declined to identify. The item has been on loan to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., for four decades.
The pitcher bears the Great Seal of the United States and is engraved with the inscription, "To the President of the United States Abraham Lincoln from his Washington Friends March 4, 1861."
The curator of the Lincoln collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., says there is no record of the donors.
"It could be a foreign diplomatic gift, from a congressional delegation, people working for military contacts. Nobody knows," James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln collection, told the newspaper.
The Tiffany archives have no record of the piece being commissioned, Cowan said.
Nonetheless, the pitcher is generally accepted as authentic, and Cowan said he has no doubts.
"I wouldn't be selling it if I didn't think it was authentic," he said.
The decorative pitcher is called a ewer because it's shaped like a vase and has a handle and spout.
"It's a monumental piece of silver," Diane Wachs, director of the fine and decorative art department for Cowan's, told the Enquirer. "Unlike other pieces, this is valued at 10 percent object and 90 percent historical significance. And that's what makes it so intriguing."
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