Silver & Silver-plated items

Dismissed a generation ago as decorative export wares, Qing and later silver is today the focus of lively academic and commercial attention.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Albrecht Dürer’s medal dedicated to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, is among the most important medals of the Northern Renaissance. As only four are known to commerce, the appearance of one for sale is significant.

Nottingham auction house Mellors & Kirk (20% buyer’s premium) added to the cautiously feel-good mood created by some highly successful autumn sales in the provinces when strong private buying brought impressive results across the board.

A hardstone inlaid scent bottle, c.1905, by Joseph Cook & Son of Birmingham, is among the wide selection of silver available at the next Marlborough College Antiques & Fine Art Fair.

The catalogue description correctly read ‘Art Nouveau silver powder bowl by Gilbert Marks, hallmark London 1900, weight approx 8.79oz, 273.4gms, decorated with stylised thistles repousse’.

Turbulent as politics are today, they have yet to reach the rumbustious heights of a notorious 1826 by-election in Northumberland, memories of which were revisited at Newcastle auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

Even though the Bauhaus design school was forcibly closed in 1933, its influence continues to this day.

A set of 12 silver plates by Gilbert Marks, offered by The Peartree Collection, were among the stand-out sales from the opening hours of the LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair.

A large Georgian silver punch bowl made in 1824 (below) is available to buy from Highland Antiques of Aberdeen for £2450 at the next Galloway fair.

Galerie Neuse, the German dealership based in Bremen, will be in Paris during the second half of September setting up at the Paris Galerie Aveline where it is presenting an exhibition titled 'L’Apothéose du Génie' from September 11-28.

Many of the high prices achieved at last week’s ‘celebrity’ sale titled Bob Hawke & Blanche d’Alpuget: Mementos, Curiosities, Art and Design reflected the impact of souvenir hunters, anxious to own a reminder of Australia’s former prime minister who died earlier this year. But not all of them.

The term ‘duty dodgers’ is applied to pieces that were not sent for assay during the period 1720-58 when a steep tax was placed on silver. Silversmiths had a variety of methods of escaping this tax – including transposing marks from small articles to large or overstriking marks from older pieces.

A selection of silver lots coming up in the salerooms.

Jeffrey Lassaline has joined Tennants as silver and objects of vertu specialist.

Of the 24 silversmiths known to have worked in the Aberdeenshire town of Banff from the 17th century until the trade died out in the mid-1800s, William Scott the Elder is the first whose name is recorded.

A selection of stand-out auction results for silver in recent sales.

It was decades after the First Fleet landed in Sydney cove in 1788 before anything like a recognisable silver trade developed in Australia, writes Jolyon Warwick James.