Silver & Silver-plated items

This novelty silver scent bottle, below, appealing to two niche sections largely immune to the swings of the larger silver market, was a target for collectors when offered at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Not every Victorian silver tea and coffee service was sold for scrap in the great meltdown of 2011– when at one point the price reached almost £30 per oz.

These outsize tongs, below, proved the major surprise at Adam’s (20% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on June 17.

As collecting evolves, many pieces of decorative, and historically captivating, Georgian silver are priced very keenly at both auction and retail.

The recent death of designer Stuart Devlin and the book he published just a few months before could lead to a reappraisal of his work.

Considering that Norwich was, after London, the largest and wealthiest city in England from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, its assay office (1562-1705) was comparatively shortlived. As such, secular silver produced in the city rarely appears on the market.

Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) is currently selling across a number of auctions a cache of items from the family of HG Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

Four days after fire gutted the Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, this silver-plated teaspoon, below, designed by the great man was offered by Derbyshire auction house Hansons (20% buyer’s premium).

As regimental silver, the Victorian centrepiece shown below qualified to be part of the Militaria, Coins & Medals sale at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne and, as a memento of the gallant 9th (The Queen’s Royal) Lancers, it swept the field.

In the heart of London’s legal district, two storeys underground, lies the world’s biggest concentration of antique silver offered by the world’s most extensive concentration of antique silver dealers. Welcome to The London Silver Vaults.

The London Silver Vaults unites dozens of independent firms – many long-standing family businesses – with a shared passion for the gleam of polished white metal. In this advertising feature, we meet some of the faces behind those iron doors.

Another spring sale, another impressive total. But perhaps what distinguished the silver sale held at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) was that the £750,000 total was mainly built up by affordable collectors’ items.

An essential of genteel Georgian life, silver apple corers with their simple elegance were once much prized by collectors. However, a collection of nine early 19th century examples offered at Woolley & Wallis on April 24-25 met a mixed reception, with only five getting away.

A speciality for collectors of silver wine labels are the enamelled examples produced in Battersea in the 18th century.

Two fine Dutch pieces quadrupled estimates at Woolley & Wallis on April 24-25: a c.1637 wine cup by an unidentified Middelburg smith and a table bell.

The British Hallmarking Council (BHC) has decided that hallmarks struck offshore by UK assay offices should be different to those applied in the UK.

Marcus Budgen is to head the Spink medals department after the departure of David Erskine-Hill.

The increasing market interest in modern designer silver was well catered for among the contents of North Mymms Park offered at Sworders.

Among the silver from North Mymms Park lots offered at Sworders, a couple of 18th century classics, a c.1735 Scottish bullet teapot and a pair of John Cafe London 1775 table candlesticks, were eclipsed by the surprise success of a scantily catalogued Oriental teapot.