The fish slice was intended to filet fish at the table. An eighteenth-century form, the earliest examples resembled wood-handle trowels and were distinguished by elaborately pierced and engraved blades. By the third quarter of the century the form was first produced in the American colonies. Thomas Fletcher's slice resonates with the boldness and scale that characterizes Grecian flatware. Its blade is painstakingly engraved with a classically inspired dolphin, and its fiddle thread and shell handle proffers the most fully developed expression of this conventional pattern.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.