Chats on Old Sheffield Plate

by Arthur Hayden

There are many occasions when sacrifices have had to be made and when prototypes have been destroyed and substitutes have arisen which have artistically filled the hiatus, if only for the time being. For instance, the extravagance of Louis XIV in regard to sumptuous silver passed all bounds. At a fête at Versailles in 1668 on each side of the royal buffet was elevated on a portico ten feet high a grand silver guéridon bearing a massive silver girandole which lighted the buffet, accompanied by numerous large silver vases. On the table and steps of the buffet, which reached the height of twenty-five feet, were arranged twenty-four massive bowls of fine workmanship—these were separated by as many large vases, cassolettes and girandoles of great beauty. There were on the table twenty-four large silver jardinières full of flowers, in front was a great silver cistern shaped like a shell, at the two extremities were four guéridons, six feet high, surmounted by silver girandoles. Two other tables for the ladies were similarly equipped with masterpieces of the silversmiths' art.

In 1688 the Grande Monarque needed money to carry on his wars, and he issued an edict forbidding the manufacture of such massive silver, and sent all his plate to the Mint. So all this fine work, designed, made by Claude Ballin, Pierre Germain, Montars and other celebrated craftsmen after designs by Le Brun, was melted down; happily the pieces were first drawn by the artist goldsmith Delaunay and their forms are preserved. The king made it compulsory that the fine plate of the nobility should be sacrificed too, and in consequence most of the fine old silver was melted down.

But here comes the imitative note. The age of sumptuous silversmiths' work was followed by an age of fine pottery. Beautifully decorated earthenware and porcelain became fashionable. Rouen made a special service for Louis XIV, and a great impetus was given to the art of the factories of Moustiers, Marseilles and Nevers, and thus the nobles of France had their banquets from the clay of the potter instead of from the vessels of the silversmith.

As will be shown later the relationship between the art of the potter and that of the silversmith has always been somewhat closely allied. The designs of the one have, although not necessarily adapted to a differing technique, been boldly taken and assimilated in results that leave their note of incongruity to be criticized by collectors and connoisseurs to-day.

European Imitativeness.—In order to arrive at a closer appreciation of the niceties of imitation, perhaps it would be better to commence by attempting to understand what is originality and where it can be found. But that would entail a great amount of study. In porcelain one would have to follow the attempts of the Dutch school of potters and bow down in admiration to Meissen, where the first true porcelain was made in Europe. All else is imitative, including Sèvres and Wedgwood and Worcester. Nor does imitation stand arrested at technique, it follows slavishly the oriental prototype in design. We find pagodas and Chinese landscapes, and little figures which meant so much in a language of symbolism, scattered promiscuously on Delft beakers and on Bow cups. Wedgwood, in his Portland Vase, copied a prototype of blue glass. In his classic subjects in relief on his vases and his cameos he builded on the reputation of Greek and Roman types translated through the brain of John Flaxman, and there was a school of potters who came second-hand after Wedgwood and imitatively carried on his classic style.

The whole of the school of decorating furniture in lac is imitated from the East, and a poor imitation at best.

What the glass-worker did at Venice was copied over the Alps in Germany. It suffered in translation and finally became something new. The bulbous appendages to German glass were the crescendo note of the Italian more reticent ornament. When the Murano glass-worker added the tiny griffin-like symbolized version of the small sea-horse found in the Adriatic to the handles of his tazzas, he added a touch of grace and beauty. But the German developed these into chimerical beasts.

In an examination of European art one wonders where imitation ends and where originality begins. Originality unfortunately often begins just at that point when the original touch of genius is lost sight of and when banal excrescences are added, meaningless and offensive.

But originality and fertility of design often begin when experimentalists set out to produce one thing and realized another, and commenced a new technique and became original in so doing. The search for the philosopher's stone was futile, the old alchymists in their laboratories, though they never found the means of transmuting baser metals into gold, made experiments which begat the results of modern science.

Impulses are carried out in various countries in accordance with national limitations. The East African negro who patiently covers a gin bottle with bead-work, proudly displayed as native art by a missionary society in London, is obeying the instinct to embellish and add his own genius to that of the alien. He knows the value the white man puts on the spirit bottle, and he worships afar off at the same shrine.