Norway's Silver Heritage: 1000 Years of Norwegian Silver

Magazine Antiques, August, 1998 by Alfred Mayor

Norwegian silver

From 1442 until independence in 1905 Norway was under the sway of others - first Denmark until 1814, and then Sweden. Its long, protected west coast first exported Vikings and then imported English and German traders, with the consequent swirls of foreign stylistic influences on Norwegian decorative arts. Nonetheless, in its long tradition of silversmithing. Norway has held its own both in the skill of its artisans and the vigorous quirkiness of their designs.

Norway's Silver Heritage is a fine introduction to a subject that by the authors' own admission has been only sketchily studied. Brief essays touch on some of the salient cultural and political events that affected silver production, but the preponderance of the book is a series of full-page color illustrations of the best Norwegian silver opposite a page of text about each object, its maker, propose, and style.

Thus we learn that the seventeenth-century Norwegian diet of dried food and salted fish contributed to a powerful national thirst that kept goldsmiths busy making tankards known as potter, each holding not quite a liter of beer. Christian W (1577-1648), for example, knocked back between eight and ten potter of beer a day. Yet he rebuilt Oslo after its destruction by fire in 1624, reformed the government, reorganized the country's defenses, and developed its natural resources.

Christian also decreed that the journeyman goldsmith had to travel for two years and to qualify for membership in the guild he had to make a standing cup, an enameled gold ring with a transparent stone, and a signet. In the seventeenth century the signet was replaced by a gold brooch with a mounted stone, and in the eighteenth century the cup was replaced by a coffeepot. But in the beginning there was the cup, which was sometimes bought by a guild as its ceremonial drinking cup. It became known as the welcome cup because when a member was received into the guild he was allowed to hang his small silver shield from tiny fittings on the cup. One made in Bergen in 1643 and sold to the tailors' guild is shown festooned with twenty-seven shields.

Also illustrated are two seventeenth-century covered vessels with three round balls on top of the lid. This odd feature suggests that the top could be inverted and become a bowl. But what these covered vessels were used for remains a mystery today. Referring to a Bergen example of the 1640s the authors speculate: "Perhaps it was a porridge bowl to be taken on calls made after childbirth?"

Fine enamel work, silver filigree, and engraving are all found among the objects chosen for illustration. However, the leitmotiv that binds nearly all this silver and sets it off from contemporary counterparts elsewhere, is the three-dimensional ornament. A standing crucifix of about 1100 is supported on a platform made up of six small dragons that terminate in large animal feet. A late sixteenth-century silver beaker stands on small inverted bowls that each supports a crowned and armed figure identified as Saint Olav. The wide, bold frieze around the base of a Bergen tankard of about 1630 is asquirm with rearing horses, rampant foliage, and the heads of putti. The thumbpiece of an otherwise chastely engraved, Trondheim covered tankard of 1651 is an outsized eagle, wings spread. The thumbpiece on a Bergen wine flagon of 1661 is a mermaid with a forked tail; the terminal of the handle is the head of a furry animal; and the wine issues from the mouth of a smiling dragon. A squat covered tankard of 1660 made in Oslo (then Christiania) rests on three recumbent lions, while another forms the thumbpiece. In bold relief around the body are baroque blossoms in which nestles a stout naked boy looking glum and clutching what could be a jug of wine. Realistic winged dolphins support a tankard of the 1670s that is chased with the story of Orpheus charming animals with his music and Perseus overcoming a sea monster to free the chained Andromeda. A nautilus shell mounted in silver in the 1720s balances on a standing silver Neptune riding a dolphin, while above, on the curl of the shell as on the crest of a wave, a seated cupid rides another, quite toothy. dolphin.

For the vigor of the ornament alone, the Norwegian silver pictured in this book should please small children as much as collectors. Like Irish Georgian furniture, on which hooves and paws are closer to the paddock than the design book, so Norway's relative isolation insured the literalness of the storyteller rather than the abstractions of the philosopher in its silversmiths.