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A magnificent pair of Victorian silver gilt mounted rock crystal claret jugs, the silver by the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company, London and the glass most probably by Thomas Webb and Sons, each of ovoid-shape cut and engraved overall with flowers, birds and foliage amid interlaced scrolled borders on a spreading and undulating silver gilt base with shaped edge, with pierced silver gilt ring band, the silver gilt mounted neck with lower pierced foliate scrolls chased with flowers, foliage and panelled cartouches, the spout chased with fruit, surmounted by a hinged domed cover, the curved part-reeded handle enclosing foliate scrolled panels
The glass made at Stourbridge; the silver gilt London, one dated 1896, the other dated 1904
Fully hallmarked. Height 30 cm. each.
Although early advertisements for the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company describe them as manufacturers they were essentially retail jewellers and silversmiths. The firm founded in 1880, had large and very prestigious premises at 112 Regent Street, London and in 1881 boasted ‘The largest stock, the newest designs, the highest quality’. An illustration of their shop in “The Queen” magazine of 1884 (reproduced in John Culme, “Nineteenth Century Silver”, 1977, p. 188-9) shows members of society in a grand room with stairs leading to another floor. On display was a large selection of silver from dinner services, vases, clocks and jewellery. In addition to their usual stock special orders were taken, such as a silver table more than 10 feet in circumference, which was supplied to an American client in 1896, the same year in which the first of these claret jugs was hallmarked. In about that same year the company expanded their Regent Street premises to include adjacent.
The firm took part in the numerous exhibitions including the Fisheries Exhibition of 1883, the Inventions Exhibition of 1885, the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886. They also showed at the International Exhibitions held in Paris 1889, Chicago 1893, California 1894 and Paris 1900, where the display was awarded the Grand Prix. The original partners of the firm were William Gibson and John Lawrence Langman. Following the purchase of the Goldsmiths’ Alliance Ltd. (formerly A. B. Savory and Son), the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Co. became a limited company in 1898. They eventually amalgamated with Garrards in 1952.
The leading manufacturers of English rock crystal were Thomas Webb and Sons and Stevens and Williams from the Stourbridge area in the West Midlands. Roger Dodsworth, Keeper of Glass at Broadfield Glass Museum, near Stourbridge asserts that ‘If I had to choose, I would say that your jugs were made by Webb’s because of the elaborate metal mounts’. The official catalogue for the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1878 described Webb’s as ‘the best maker of Crystal Glass in England and consequently the World’, and according to a critic for the Birmingham Daily Gazette ‘For Purity of form and metal nothing could surpass [their] claret jugs and decanters, the water jugs and goblets’. In January 1892, the Pottery Gazette noted ‘Messrs Thos. Webb and Sons Limited of the Dennis Glass Works, Stourbridge are producing some superb art work in glass which they have named Engraved Rock Crystal. We recently inspected part of a table service, the price of which was between three and four hundred pounds, the decanters being £36 and the wine glasses £2 a piece…They are now making this a speciality, the metal is cut away, showing the pattern where necessary in high relief in combination with the other portion of the engraved design. Each service is worked out by the artist, so that buyers who pay a high price, in consequence of the large amount of labour involved are sure of getting something unique, and an article which nobody else can put of their table’.
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