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On the Tuesday morning of Commencement week, a silver pitcher and goblet appear from the storage vaults of the Fogg Art Museum to grace the speakers' table at the annual meeting of the Alpha Iota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Sanders Theatre. This has happened for many years, although diligent inquiry has failed to discover how many.

The silver was given to the College in 1892 by Sarah Wyman Whitman, in the name of her brother, Charles Wyman, A.B. 1867, "to be used by the University on public occasions in Sanders Theatre." Charles spent most of his adult life in a mental institution; the silver may have been Sarah's way of marking his 25th reunion year.

She designed the silver herself and had it made by Shreve Crump & Low. Celebrated as a Boston hostess, Whitman was, more enduringly, an artist who worked in many mediums. She painted portraits in oil; designed the stained-glass rose window in the south transept of Memorial Hall; created interiors, some at Radcliffe; and fashioned Houghton Mifflin book jackets for the novels of her friend Sarah Orne Jewett.

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