GROUP OF SILVER LUSTRE WARE.
Coffee Pot. Basin. Teapot.
The Staffordshire potter's imitation of silver.
GLASS CANDLESTICKS.
Late eighteenth century.
It is thus evident that baser metals had from time immemorial been plated with silver, and, given an unprotected public, many such frauds could be perpetrated by skilful and unscrupulous craftsmen. In fact they were perpetrated. In 1767 a working silversmith was prosecuted by indictment upon Stat. XXVIII Edward I and Stat. VI George I, cap. 11 for soldering bits of standard silver to tea-tongs and shoe-buckles which were worse than standard and sending the same to the Goldsmiths' Company Assay Office at London in order fraudulently to obtain their marks to the same. In France from 1753 to 1759 a set of regulations to be observed by silversmiths in the profession of their art enacts that "They shall not make the rims turned over full of solder, in form of hammered edges to basins, dishes and plates; nor shall they under pretext of joining, solder on to them other bottoms."
The methods employed prior to the invention of the plating by fusion and rolling in sheets at Sheffield was known as French plating. Throughout the eighteenth century clock cases were silvered by this method, and successive layers of silver could be applied to any thickness required.
Silver Platers at Sheffield.—The platers set out frankly as a school of copyists to imitate silver plate. They laid a thin imposition of silver on copper and rolled it and dealt with the sheets as if they were solid silver. They suffered from many disadvantages which they eventually overcame; they competed directly, and more directly, than did the Staffordshire potters with the silversmiths. The potter snatched the silver models and so did they. But he had less reason than they because he left his proper technique as a worker in clay in so doing. It was no new thing to plate baser metals with silver or with gold. But the method by which it was accomplished and the rolled-out sheets were new. To rush into a general industry to expend great capital on it, to launch it on the market, to compete with the richest and closest corporation of goldsmiths in the world, was a new and audacious venture, and this Sheffield did, and the designs partook of the character of the finest produced by the experienced workers in silver plate.
It is an incongruous situation wherein this school of imitators, who set out diffidently to simulate silver and were presently met by severe statutes of the realm and with severe penalties for producing marks simulating those of the assay offices, overrode the tide that set against them and were finally acknowledged by statute as genuine craftsmen to be protected in a great industry, and Sheffield obtained an assay office of her own, with overlordship over her platers.