Silver, London hallmarks for 1899-1900, mark of Gilbert Marks.

Two handled cup. Hand raised with repousse decoration of rose swags around the belly of the cup. The handles are cast separately, soldered to the cup and chased.

Acquisition RF: 64 / 1021
Purchase - £27
From M P Levene Ltd., 5 Thurloe Place, SW7
On leaving school Marks joined a firm of manufacturing silversmiths which he left after seven years in 1885 to set up his own workshop where he made a point of doing everything by hand. His untimely death at the age of 46 has meant that his significance in the British Arts and Crafts movement has been overlooked until relatively recently.

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)

On leaving school, Gilbert Marks joined a firm of manufacturing silversmiths. In 1885, after seven years, he left them to set up his own workshop. Here he made a point of doing everything by hand. His early death at the age of 46 has meant that his significance in the British Arts and Crafts movement has been overlooked.

CIRC.171-1964