Silver & Silver-plated items

When it comes to auctions of Stuart Devlin silver, a very good market test is coming up soon. Catherine Southon’s October 3 sale at Farleigh Court Golf Club in Selsdon, Surrey, offers a single-owner collection.

MADAM – I was interested to see the picture of ‘outsize tongs’ considered to vegetable tongs or salad servers from a recent Adam’s sale in Dublin (ATG No 2352, page 21).

The so-called auricular style – all organic fluid lines and asymmetrical shapes populated by marine invertebrates and reptiles – can first be found in the 1598 ornament book of Northern Mannerism, Architectura…, by Wendel Dietterlin of Stuttgart.

While good-quality but familiar Georgian silver such as entrée dishes, tureens and sauceboats estimated in the £6000-12,000 range met stiff resistance at Dorchester auction house Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) on June 28, two top-quality pieces made their money.

Pairs of Georgian candlesticks by the best-known London specialist makers such as William Cafe and Ebenezer Coker continue to sell well enough, as long as condition is acceptable.

This novelty silver scent bottle, below, appealing to two niche sections largely immune to the swings of the larger silver market, was a target for collectors when offered at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Not every Victorian silver tea and coffee service was sold for scrap in the great meltdown of 2011– when at one point the price reached almost £30 per oz.

These outsize tongs, below, proved the major surprise at Adam’s (20% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on June 17.

As collecting evolves, many pieces of decorative, and historically captivating, Georgian silver are priced very keenly at both auction and retail.

The recent death of designer Stuart Devlin and the book he published just a few months before could lead to a reappraisal of his work.

Considering that Norwich was, after London, the largest and wealthiest city in England from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, its assay office (1562-1705) was comparatively shortlived. As such, secular silver produced in the city rarely appears on the market.

Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) is currently selling across a number of auctions a cache of items from the family of HG Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

Four days after fire gutted the Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, this silver-plated teaspoon, below, designed by the great man was offered by Derbyshire auction house Hansons (20% buyer’s premium).

As regimental silver, the Victorian centrepiece shown below qualified to be part of the Militaria, Coins & Medals sale at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne and, as a memento of the gallant 9th (The Queen’s Royal) Lancers, it swept the field.

In the heart of London’s legal district, two storeys underground, lies the world’s biggest concentration of antique silver offered by the world’s most extensive concentration of antique silver dealers. Welcome to The London Silver Vaults.

The London Silver Vaults unites dozens of independent firms – many long-standing family businesses – with a shared passion for the gleam of polished white metal. In this advertising feature, we meet some of the faces behind those iron doors.