Bracelet
|
|
|
Bracelet |
|
|
|
This silver and enamel bracelet measures 19cm (7 ½”) long and probably dates from the 1870s. It consists of five tudor rose medallions connected by ornate links (some of which are missing or have been replaced). Each medallion contains a small round enamel and silver panel, four with a fantastical animal, and one with the letter ‘N’. The bracelet was probably a gift from Burges to his niece Nora Burges. | |
|
|
Whilst most of Burges’s secular metalwork was designed for his own use (eg. see the knives and forks, decanter and letterbox in the Gallery’s collection – LINK) he occasionally designed jewellery as gifts for friends and patrons (Crook, p.317). |
| However, he felt that on a technical level mid-Victorian jewellery making was at a low ebb: ‘it is very galling, in these days of steam-engines and oxy-hydrogen blow-pipes, to be told that the Etruscans had a solder that we cannot obtain – a matter of chemistry, and not of art’. He was particularly fond of enamelling, both cloisonné and champlevé, but felt that there would be little improvement in the craft in England until jewellery firms created enamels from scratch within their own workshops rather than employing enamellers from outside. He eventually persuaded Barkentin and Krall to do just that (Crook, p.313). | |
