Silver set with opals, Birmingham hallmarks for 1904-5, mark of Liberty & Co., designed by Bernard Cuzner.

Circular bowl with convex sides and everted rim, supported by four, curved feet which rise from an annular ring. The opals (probably South Australian) in rub over settings and placed in a line below the rim and bordered above and below with a row of double, engraved lines. The feet terminate with the bowl in an embossed stylised leaf and join the annular ring in a small, stylised scroll.

One of Cuzner's best known designs for Liberty and repeated with minor variations by him for private commissions. Cuzner trained at the Redditch School of Art, the Vittoria Street School of Jewellers and Silversmiths and Birmingham College of Art under R. Catterson-Smith and Arthur Gaskin.

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)

Bernard Cuzner (1877-1956) designed this silver bowl set with fiery South Australian opals. It was one of his best-known designs for Liberty & Co., the London department store Arthur Lasenby Liberty founded in 1875. He also repeated it with minor variations for private commissions.

Cuzner supplied further designs for the Cymric silverware and jewellery range started by Liberty in 1899.

M.305-1975