Mary Cooke
This George III bread basket by Benjamin and James Smith is priced at £12,950 by Mary Cooke Antiques at BADA 2017, held at the Duke of York Square, Chelsea, from March 15-24. Well marked to the foot for 1809 (the first of the Smith brothers’ brief four-year partnership), the 50oz basket assumes an unusual design combining fruiting vines with a pierced border of wheat ears.
Titus Omega
Also at the BADA fair is decorative arts specialist Titus Omega.
Pictured is a probably unique 1901 sugar caster designed by Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942) for The Guild of Handicraft, priced at £27,500. The 5in (13cm) caster, incorporating five enamel panels of a serpent curled around a tree, was exhibited at the Arts & Crafts Exhibition at New Gallery, Regent Street, in 1903 and was illustrated in volume 28 of The Studio magazine.
Eastdale Antiques
Eastdale Antiques will be among the half-a-dozen silver specialists exhibiting at the spring edition of the Antiques for Everyone fair at the NEC in Birmingham on April 6-9. The Derbyshire firm will bring this unusual silver model of a marabou stork (also known as the undertaker bird) priced at £3650. Weighing just over 20oz and standing 11in (28cm) tall, it has import marks and hallmarks for Edinburgh, 1941, to both the body and the detachable head.
Dickenson
Godalming dealer Alastair Dickenson Fine Silver has recently acquired this early electrotype cup and stand made by Elkington, Mason and Co, c.1845. Chased with scenes from Homer, it copies an original discovered at Pompeii and now in the Naples Museum.
The signature in Greek reads Benjamin Schlick created it – a reference to a Danish-born antiquarian who was among the first designers to be employed by George Elkington to exploit the new process of electroforming in the 1840s. The two men met in 1843 when Schlick, fascinated by the excavations and discoveries emerging from Herculaneum and Pompeii, was quick to grasp the significance of a process whereby near-exact copies of antique metalwork could be mass produced at a reasonable cost.
A similar cup without the sheet copper and gilt stand is in the Minneapolis museum. Dickenson is pricing his example in the region of £1200.
