Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, April, 1996 by Eleanor Gustafson

The basket designed by Josef Hoffmann in combination with a desk and chair already in the collection provides a fuller understanding of the work of this extremely influential architect and designer at the turn of the twentieth century. Hoffmann's most innovative designs were for metalwork, particularly those, such as the example shown here, that used sheet metal perforated by a regular pattern of squares in imitation of latticework. Latticework pieces were made in brass, silver plate, and enameled metal. The use of silver here suggests that the basket was a special commission.

The sideboard dish ears the mark of the London silversmith Thomas Holland II, but he almost certainly served only as the retailer, for in style the dish is unmistakably the work of the Londoner William Pitts II. It is an excellent example of the heavy, antiquarian revival style that Pitts is believed to have introduced and for which the Pitts workshop was famous. The cast and chased rim shows three scenes from classical antiquity, each repeated four times: the banquet of the gods, with Ganymede presenting a cup to Jupiter; the gods on Mount Olympus; and Hercules embracing Omphale. Inside, a chased band of flowers and leaves surrounds a depiction of the death of Niobe's children. Pitts is known to have executed similar sideboard dishes for the royal silversmithing firm of Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, and several remain in the British royal collection today.

Equal in exuberance to the sideboard dish, the caviar pail pays homage to the sea and its most coveted delicacy. It was made by the workshop of John Mortimer and John Samuel Hunt (the one-time partners of Paul Storr, who began the firm in 1819). The pail's design is based on an engraving of 1746 by Jacques Francois Saly (1717-1776), which was contained in a scrapbook of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century prints compiled by the firm Storr and Mortimer (1822-1838). Cast and chased into the base of rocks and sealife is the coat of arms of the Russian prince Worontsov Dashkov, and engraved under the base is "7," suggesting that the pail was once part of a larger service. The bell-shaped conch shell, which seems to have just been raised from the ocean by the three mermen, would have held tremendous quantities of glistening caviar, an exotic and costly treat even in Russia, where such a piece would have provided far-reaching testament to the talents of Mortimer and Hunt.