The Newark Museum is the largest museum in New Jersey and includes the state's largest collection of silver. House & Home is the Museum's permanent suite of galleries devoted to decorative arts, displayed in the 1885 Ballantine House, a twenty-five room mansion built for Newark beer magnate John H. Ballantine. In these galleries, silver from four centuries has been displayed in ways that illuminate the story behind the object--the reason it was desired in the first place, and the reason it has survived to the present day.

The Ward family tankard is the only piece of 17th-century American silver known to have survived in New Jersey since it was originally made for one of Newark's founding Puritan families in the 1690s.

One of the greatest, latest, yet least-known of Gorham's legendary Martelé line of handwrought silver, the Hillas cup was given to a New Jersey insurance company executive in 1916 to celebrate his 40th anniversary with the firm. His son donated the piece to the Museum in the 1960s, when

many great presentation pieces went to the crucible. This cup will be included in the National Gallery's exhibition on the art nouveau in 1900, opening in September 2000 in Washington.

This extraordinary sideboard dish was partly responsible for Tiffany & Co. winning all the prizes at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and again in Paris at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. It is one of the first pieces of elaborately inlaid silver produced in America, and represents Tiffany's entry into the international arena as America's greatest silver producer and retailer. Lost for over a century, this dish only surfaced in 1998, when the Museum acquired it.

Ann Dunkin Henry, a wealthy widow in late 18th-century Philadelphia, gave this beautiful sugar bowl--one of the only examples of its kind known today--to her first-born granddaughter in 1793. The bowl then passed down through eight generations of women, until it was donated to the Museum by the last of the female line.