Enamelled brass ('London Enamel' formerly 'Surrey Enamel'), probably made by Anthony Hatch and Stephen Pilcherd, London, 1650-1680

Brass candlestick, cast, with dark blue and white matt enamel, the fields for the enamels cast in the mould, decorated with flowers, the foot circular with foliage, the stem hexagonal and tapering, the socket hexagonal and flared.

This candlestick is from a group of cast and enamelled brasswares that include stirrups, mirror-frames, fire-dogs, sconces, badges and sword-hilts. The colours used for the enamelling were limited to matt black, white, blue, green, yellow and red and the cast work is usually roughly finished. Some have Royalist associations including badges decorated with the Royal arms.

The items in the group are distinguished by their method of production: the fields to be enamelled were cast in the original moulds and not, as was more common, engraved (champlévé) or enclosed (cloisonné). They were for a long time referred to as Surrey Enamels after the author Charles R. Beard ascribed their manufacture to a factory in Esher, Surrey, but documentary evidence makes a strong case for their reattribution to the London workshops of Anthony Hatch and Stephen Pilcherd.

Hatch, a prominent member of the Armourers and Braziers Company, supplied an enamelled brass chimney piece to the Company, which was placed in the Court Room. This was presumably similar in style to the other enamelled wares from this group, which of course included other wares associated with fireplaces. Hatch worked with Pilchard, another member of the Armourers and Braziers Company.

Few examples of these enamelled wares survive and along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the V&A has the largest holding in the world at around a dozen examples. The comparatively small output of work and the repeated use of identical moulds for the stems of candlesticks, firedogs and cups suggests these objects are the products one workshop. Even domestic wares decorated with enamel would have been expensive, which implies that the workshop that produced them would have had a small but comparatively wealthy clientele.

This candlestick is from a distinct group of 17th-century cast and enamelled brasswares that include stirrups, mirror-frames, fire-dogs, sconces, badges and sword-hilts. The colours used for the enamelling were limited to matt black, white, blue, green, yellow and red and the cast work is usually roughly finished. Some have Royalist associations including badges decorated with the Royal arms.

The items in the group are distinguished by their method of production: the fields to be enamelled were cast in the original moulds and not, as was more common, engraved (champlévé) or enclosed (cloisonné). They were for a long time referred to as Surrey Enamels after the author Charles R. Beard ascribed their manufacture to a factory in Esher, Surrey, but documentary evidence makes a strong case for their reattribution to the London workshops of Anthony Hatch and Stephen Pilcherd.

Hatch, a prominent member of the Armourers and Braziers Company, supplied an enamelled brass chimney piece to the Company, which was placed in the Court Room. This was presumably similar in style to the other enamelled wares from this group, which of course included other wares associated with fireplaces. Hatch worked with Pilchard, another member of the Armourers and Braziers Company.

The comparatively small output of work and the repeated use of identical moulds for the stems of candlesticks, firedogs and cups suggests these objects are the products of one workshop. Even domestic wares decorated with enamel would have been expensive, which implies that the workshop that produced them would have had a small but comparatively wealthy clientele.

904-1900