| First published | 1920 |
| Second Impression | 1924 |
(All rights reserved)
TO MY FRIEND
WALTER IDRIS,
IN APPRECIATION OF
KINDRED RECOGNITION
PREFACE
Many readers have importuned me to write a companion volume to my Chats on Old Silver, to complete the chain of evolution of the metal-smith's art in regard to silver plate and silver plated ware. Accordingly this volume appears as a complementary and companion volume to that on "Old Silver," and although the former describes the history and character of the silversmiths' work from Elizabeth to Victoria, the present volume covers a much shorter period, approximately a hundred years, when the plater's skill, in what is now generally known as old Sheffield Plate, of superimposing a thin sheet of silver on a copper base, won a triumph in the great art of simulation until it was superseded by the modern electro-plating process.
The invention was discovered and first practised at Sheffield, but it soon covered a wider area, and plated ware by fusion and rolled was made at Birmingham, London, Nottingham and elsewhere. But it still retains the name of Sheffield Plate, and nothing can remove this title from the public mind, although it is a misnomer. "Sheffield Plate" is Sheffield solid silver duly assayed at the Sheffield Assay Office, which has existed since 1773, and bears the crown as the town mark together with the maker's initials and the date letter, the same as sterling silver plate assayed at London, Birmingham, Chester, Edinburgh, Dublin, or any other of the assay offices. Sheffield Plated Ware is a copy or simulation of real plate. It was, as this volume shows, possessed of considerable artistic qualities, it was fashioned by craftsmen who were masters of a clever technique, and it is, if not a lost art, certainly an art not practised in the old methods nor with the same exactitude nowadays, and as such it is worthy of the serious attention of the collector.