Not on display

Knife

ca. 1600 (made)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

Penknife with a parcel-gilt silver handle with a pommel of cherub's heads and scrolls

Object details

Categories
Object type
Materials and techniques
Steel and silver, parcel gilt
Brief description
Penknife with a parcel-gilt silver handle with a pommel of cherub's heads and scrolls, Germany, ca.1600
Physical description
Penknife with a parcel-gilt silver handle with a pommel of cherub's heads and scrolls
Dimensions
  • Length: 5.37in
Object history
Provenance

Ralph Bernal (1783-1854) was a renowned collector and objects from his collection are now in museums across the world, including the V&A. He was born into a Sephardic Jewish family of Spanish descent, but was baptised into the Christian religion at the age of 22. Bernal studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and subsequently became a prominent Whig politician. He built a reputation for himself as a man of taste and culture through the collection he amassed and later in life he became the president of the British Archaeological Society. Yet the main source of income which enabled him to do this was the profits from enslaved labour.

In 1811, Bernal inherited three sugar plantations in Jamaica, where over 500 people were eventually enslaved. Almost immediately, he began collecting works of art and antiquities. After the emancipation of those enslaved in the British Caribbean in the 1830s, made possible in part by acts of their own resistance, Bernal was awarded compensation of more than £11,450 (equivalent to over £1.5 million today). This was for the loss of 564 people enslaved on Bernal's estates who were classed by the British government as his 'property'. They included people like Antora, and her son Edward, who in August 1834 was around five years old (The National Archives, T 71/49). Receiving the money appears to have led to an escalation of Bernal's collecting.

When Bernal died in 1855, he was celebrated for 'the perfection of his taste, as well as the extent of his knowledge' (Christie and Manson, 1855). His collection was dispersed in a major auction during which the Museum of Ornamental Art at Marlborough House, which later became the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), was the biggest single buyer.
Subject depicted
Association
Bibliographic references
  • Christie and Manson, Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Works of Art, from the Byzantine Period to that of Louis Seize, of that Distinguished Collector, Ralph Bernal (London, 1855)
  • The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Slave Registers: Jamaica: St. Ann. (1) Indexed, 1832, T 71/49
  • Hannah Young, ''The perfection of his taste': Ralph Bernal, collecting and slave-ownership in 19th-century Britain', Cultural and Social History, 19:1 (2022), pp. 19-37
Collection
Accession number
2271-1855

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Record createdFebruary 25, 2005
Record URL
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