College and Corpoorate plate,
South Kensington Museum Art Handbooks, By Wilfred Joseph Cripps, 1881
https://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep7zak
This book is an essential for anyone interested in chasing and
repousse designs and details.
This 173 page 1881 book is intended for silversmiths to work from as
well as to educate the public. The images are of electroformed
reproductions of what was considered the best of English
silversmithing at that time. The reproductions are exact and
painstakingly made. It reveals what, in 1881, was considered the
best silversmithing in the world (ok, especially in England).
The works were assembled from many colleges at Oxford, Cambridge and
Ireland, as well as from numerous city collections and corporate
collections. It is a pretty exhaustive list, and shows what was
considered valuable and treasure in the culture at that time.
It contains a history of silversmithing starting 12 centuries BC.
The history section is very thorough, from a western point of view.
The story is told be describing objects and comparing them The
section is really large, the bulk of the book, and deep. It covers
silverwork, goldwork, enameling and more, jewelers, famous smiths
and more are recorded in great detail. The descriptions of specific
objects are remarkable, and really wonderful.
Really good images. Cups, goblets, chalices are really well
discussed. The use of ostrich eggs, coconuts and other exotic
evidence of conquest are explained.
This is an incredibly thorough book discussing significant
silversmithing. Anyone interesting in chasing will thrill to this
book. It has so much detail in the images about high quality chasing
that is not covered anywhere else. Really excellent pictures of
important repousse drawings, designs and components. If you were
wanting to reference historic chasing design this book is superb.
And in incredibly baroque density too.
This is the most solid history of silversmithing I have seen, in
terms of who did it, why, and for whom. It has all the names of the
best smiths of their time, and is probably the most important
historical book around.
An excellent book.
Download the full eBook at the ridiculous price of $5.
http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/ep7zak
…
Digital Antiques Books - The Jeweler’s History Project
http://www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/db
As with all the Ganoksin project books the text has been scanned
using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which means it is
searchable and useable in ways not seen in a standard pdf. Similarly
the images are separately scanned and then stitched into the text,
allowing you to zoom in for very high magnification views of the
detail in the images.
Over the last three decades we have acquired over 40 rare historical
Metalsmithing books that we will make available to jewelers,
goldsmiths and the metalsmithing community.
These books cover special techniques in depth like chasing,
repousse, engraving, niello making, Japanese chiseling, soldering,
construction, patination and metal coloring, silversmithing and
more. There are many recipes for alloys and metal surface
treatments.
The manuscripts will be gradually published in a digital format over
the coming months. For the first time in history, these ancient metal
tricks and recipes will be made available to the contemporary
community of curious artists and metalsmiths. This will
allow the reader to apply the simple and ingenious procedures used by
the jewelers of the past, long dead masters of the art of
metalsmithing. Many of the tricks and recipes described will save the
maker money, as older approaches can sometimes replace modern tools.