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Born in France, Jean-Simon Chaudron emigrated to Haiti in 1780, where he lived for thirteen years, before moving with his new wife to Philadelphia. By 1799 he was established as a silversmith and formed a partnership with Anthony Rasch, a Bavarian immigrant who had trained as a silversmith in Germany, in 1809. Utilizing technical advances that developed during the first decades of the nineteenth century, Chaudron and Rasch were able to produce a number of objects using many of the same decorative motifs. Together, the artisans created some of the most ambitious neoclassical silver in America, taking many of their decorative elements from French and English silver designs from the early nineteenth century, as well as motifs from Greek mythology.