Milk jug, silver with twisted silver wire

Silver milk jug with twisted silver wire handle

From the coffee set M.76 to 78-1997. Designed by Georg Jensen and made in his workshop as a specific commission. Kiær was the most accomplished cabinet maker in Copenhagen and a close friend of Jensen's who had asked him to make some bedroom furniture. In lieu of payment, Jensen gave his friend Kiær the tea set, inscribing his name around the base of the teapot and jug and stamping the date, 1911, on the two vessels. In Jensen's records for that year, the teapot is described as the Blossom Of Magnolia Teapot. The rosewood elements would most likely have been made by Kiær himself.

EDWARDIAN SILVER

Despite relentless commercial pressures and a conservative public which favoured historicist revivals, innovations did emerge in European silverware in the early years of the 20th century, prior to the First World War. The cup and cover (1909-10) by Child & Child of Thurloe Place, South Kensington, in a revived, German Renaissance manner illustrates the prevailing mainstream taste for historicism while the Painter and Stainers’ Cup designed by C.R. Ashbee for Harris Heal (1900-01) is a very contemporary and subtle restatement of a 17th century design and epitomises the essence of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

By 1900, Ashbee and his Guild of Handicraft had a achieved a stylistic maturity. For a while the Guild even showed a modest profit but events were moving swiftly. In the 1890s the work produced by the Guild struck a fresh and original note. By the 1900s, Ashbee was to witness others adapting his ideas and extending them further. The workshops of Henry Wilson, Nelson Dawson and Edward Spencer of the Artificer’s Guild, Omar Ramsden and in Denmark, Michelsen and Georg Jensen began to produce work that was richer and more self assured than the austere, products of the Guild of Handicraft. These firms successfully popularised the Arts and Crafts philosophy and occasionally incorporated Art Nouveau tendencies. The retailer A.L. Liberty of Regent Street with his Cymric range of silver and jewellery was the amongst the most successful and all remained commercially viable long after the demise of the Guild in 1908.

(Graphic panel: the Silver Galleries)

This milk jug comes from the set M.76 to 78-1997. It was designed by Georg Jensen and made in his workshop as a specific commission. Kiær was the most accomplished cabinetmaker in Copenhagen. He was a close friend of Jensen's, who had asked him to make some bedroom furniture. Instead of paying him, Jensen gave Kiær the tea service. He inscribed his name around the base of the teapot and jug and stamped the date, 1911, on the two vessels. In Jensen's records for that year, the teapot is described as the Blossom of Magnolia Teapot. Kiær would probably have made the rosewood elements himself.

M.77-1997