Object Description
C R Ashbee for the guild of handicraft.
A rare pair of Arts & Crafts silver salt bowls with roll-over rims and dot decoration to the bowl edges stood on four ball feet on a flaring base foot. Priced as a set.
Ashbee returned to this ball feet design on many occasions not just in silverwork but also on many of his furniture designs.
Hallmarked: CRA and with a lion, a lion’s head for London, and the date mark ‘e’ for 1900.
A word from Ashbee’s ‘Modern English Silverwork’.
I admire Ashbee’s forward to this book which reads: ‘This book of my Silver designs, represents a selection of some 200 pieces taken indiscriminately from out of the portfolios of the Guild of Handicraft, and designed and made in my workshops during the last 20 years. . . . I do not know if any excuse be needed for the publication of the drawings, beyond the fact that I wanted to get them together; and the further fact that after 20 years work I see so many cheap, and tawdry and lame repetitions of them in the shop windows, that in fairness to myself, I thought the designs should have the chance of going out as I wished them or intended them to appear. An artist under the conditions of Industrialism has no protection, any tradesman can steal his designs, he has no copyright as the author has, and it does not pay him to register, as it does the engineer or the man in control of a machine that reduplicates; if therefore a tradesman is bent on stealing, there is nothing to stop him, and as far as I am concerned he may as well steal correctly. I dedicate this book therefore to the Trade Thief, desiring him only – if indeed he have any æsthetic honour, thieves sometimes have! – to thieve accurately.’
Such golden words from a passionate polymath.