My Family Silver

three unusual silver salts with gilt and oxidised decoration from Anthony Elson

myfamilysilver.com is brimful of old silver for all tastes, useful and ornamental, but what I didn’t realise until recently was that it is also a showcase for contemporary pieces.

Tim Lukes’s appropriately named ‘Drink like a fish’ parcel-gilt silver jug and beaker recall that brief spell in the late 1870s and 1880s when Tiffany & Co created a range of objects inspired by Japanese art and workmanship. With his designs, Mr Lukes has revived the idea to create original pieces which cleverly convey watery environments inhabited by golden carp.

The ‘Packet’ dishes for nuts and bonbons by Rebecca Joselyn, which look just like the silver paper wrapping of various lines of chocolate confectionery, are in reality much more sturdy. In her own words, she creates each individually by ‘crumpling them over a stake.’ The result is an amusing twist on an old idea: the trompe l’oeil effects of pre-revolutionary Russian ‘folded napkin’ silver, for instance. Another of today’s silversmiths with strikingly fresh  ideas is Malcolm Appleby, who famously lives and works in a former railway station.  His hand made and hand engraved ‘three sided’ bowl is typical of his work, with its richly textured finish contrasting the silver of its exterior with the deep gilding of its interior.

‘Coloured’ silver has always fascinated me, like the extraordinary salts made by Anthony Elson. Here he shows three: one silver-gilt and oxidised, another chemically oxidised a blue/green colour and the third similarly treated to create a beautiful blue hue.

Tim Luke’s parcel-gilt silver ‘Drink like a fish’ jug and beaker

Picking up my theme that canny silver buyers have never had it so good, Country Life excitedly reported this week (11 February) that “changes in lifestyle have wrought havoc with the silver market” despite a recent steep rise in the bullion value of silver from £3 to £6 an ounce.

Flying in the face of the strong results in a flurry of auctions before Christmas (reported elsewhere on this page) the magazine declares that “display silver isn’t fashionable”. The investment advice is to buy work by late twentieth century silversmiths such as Gerald Benney, Leslie Durbin and (my personal favourite) Malcolm Appleby. I don’t disagree that collecting post-war British silver is an enriching and potentially rewarding experience.

We are very keen to promote contemporary silversmithing on My Family Silver, hence our support of British Silver Week. But I do object to the oft-repeated stereotype that antique silver is somehow redundant as if a modern teapot is technologically superior to one made in the eighteenth century.  Country Life also states, without any evidence, that “abundant 18^th and 19^th century pieces have dropped in value significantly”. Well, I haven’t seen that but I do accept that there is an awful lot of silver out there looking for a new owner. The reason why? Our ancestors viewed their silver as a decorative addition to their domestic lives not, as we all too often do, as an expensive liability to be insured and (worse!) cleaned. We need to re-adjust our cultural approach to this wonderful material and get it back on the table and into everyday use. I do agree with Country Life on one point, however. Echoing my recent message, the magazine reports that “canteens of good cutlery…can be bought for less than the cost of new stainless steel - good news if you need cutlery”.

My question is, Who doesn’t?