The Construction of Some Empire Silver

Abstract

THE CONVENTIONAL WAY of attaching separate decorative elements to the body of a piece of silver is by soldering. In France, until the early nineteenth century, this generally amounted to little more.than the application of handles, feet or foot rims, hinges of covers, and the like, as surface decoration was achieved by chasing, casting, and/or engraving. After about 1802, under the influence of the designers Charles Percier and Pierre-FranCois-Leonard Fontaine, Napoleon's arbiters of taste, a new style began to dominate French silver. From an integrated design comprising an interplay of techniques, the object became essentially a blank surface on which the repertory of Empire decoration-masks, swans, palmettes, classical figures-was to be displayed. In the work of Napoleon's principal 'goldsmith, Martin-Guillaume Biennais, these motifs were applied in the traditional manner, by soldering. It was Biennais's contemporary, Jean-BaptisteClaude Odiot (1763-1850), who introduced a method of construction which, though noted by previous writers, has been passed over without amplification. The method is illustrated here by two items from a 219-piece table service sold by Odiot in 1817 to Count Nikolai Demidoff (the service has been widely dispersed since it was first sold at auction in 1928). The cruet (Figure 1) is one of a pair, the large serving dish (Figure 3), one of four. Once disassembled, they show that Odiot pierced the main body of each piece with holes at the points of attachment (Figures 2 and 4), and provided the individual elements with threaded bolts (Figure 5), which were secured to the body by nuts. Each part to be applied, and its corresponding position on the main body, was coded.1 The method of bolting had some precedent in silversmithing-notably in the drinking cups modeled as stags or o her animals popular in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-but had more