Among Paul Evans’s earliest works, the pewter objects he made at Old Sturbridge Village were born from a series of craft organizations established during the Great Depression to help Americans support themselves through the creation of handmade objects. After having studied at one of these organizations, the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was founded by craft pioneer Aileen Osborn Webb, Evans exhibited work at America House in New York, another Webb organization focused on the exhibition and sale of American handmade objects, a groundbreaking commercial venture that launched the careers of many of America’s studio craftsmen. Evans continued to study metalwork at Cranbrook Academy of Art, following which he took a position in the metal shop of Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, which recreated life in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England. In his post as the Village’s first independent-living craftsman—his first commercial endeavor—Evans crafted and sold metalwork in the tradition of colonial pewtersmiths. Objects created during his tenure in Sturbridge are rare, as Evans was only there for two years after which he left Massachusetts for New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he embarked on an illustrious career at the forefront of American designer-craftsmen. The present lot tells the origin story of the American craft movement– one that is perhaps overlooked in the study of Evans’s later designs.