in 1811 but left ten years later to start his own business in partnership with John Mortimer, continuing to design and make fine things until his retirement in 1839.
Paul Storr’s fame as a silversmith is based on his exceptional technical virtuosity, his attention to detail and finish and his creative imagination. It is widely believed that none of his contemporaries could match his particular skills.
The four silver gilt salts were modelled as shells supported by mermaids and mermen. Three carried marks for 1813 and one for 1811, along with the maker’s mark for Paul Storr. During the filming, Brand Inglis suggested that the inspiration for the fluid, revived Rococo design may have come from an eighteenth-century piece by the silversmith Nicholas Sprimont (later the founder of the Chelsea porcelain factory) in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. He felt that, as Storr was frequently working for the Royal family, he could have had ample opportunity to see and admire pieces in the Royal Collection at Windsor. The Regency period in Britain was famous, not only for the extravagant lifestyle of the monarchy and those associated with it, but also for inventive and elaborate styles of design, particularly in the decorative arts. There were many influences, including earlier styles such as Gothic, Rococo and Classical, along with a taste for the exotic, the latter notably underlined by the famous Royal Pavilion in Brighton. At the same time, there was a dawning awareness of the importance of the Renaissance, with the salts also reflecting the styles associated with artists such as Cellini. There is a set of three similar salts in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States, perhaps based on a design by the English sculptor William Theed.
A MUCH UNDERRATED TREASURE
The owner, a quiet man clearly surprised by the whole filming process and the excitement generated by the salts, knew little about them. He had not considered them to be of any value, and said that his parents, who had been in service, had been given the set as a retirement present. His father had passed them on to him before his death six years ago, and since then they had lived in a plastic bag at the bottom of a bedroom cupboard. His response to Brand’s valuation of £40,000 was to say: ‘If my daughter-in-law hadn’t told me the Roadshow was coming to Salisbury, the salts would still be sitting at the bottom of that cupboard. If anything had happened to my wife and I, the children would have had no idea of their value. They would probably have gone in a job lot house clearance.’
Later, the salts were sold at auction for £66,000 to the Salters’ Company and are now in Salters’ Hall in the City of London.
Objects of high quality and value made before the seventeenth century have always been Roadshow rarities, mainly because they have been well known, appreciated and documented for centuries. Also, relatively few of importance remain in private hands. There was, therefore, great excitement in Farnham’s Sports Centre, in 1991, when a lady brought in a magnificently modelled gold plaque made in Italy between 1570 and 1580. Simon Bull, the Roadshow’s clock specialist on that day, was luckily on hand to share his great knowledge of Renaissance works of art with the owner.
Today the Renaissance, which started in Italy in the founteenth century, is universally acknowledged as a period of extraordinary creativity in the development of modern Western culture. All art forms – architecture, painting, sculpture, metalwork and jewellery, ceramics and glass, textiles, even arms and armour – were affected by a style that drew most of its inspiration from the Classical world, and its leading artists – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Cellini and so on – have long been household names. Also important were the great dynastic families of Italy, the Medici and the Borghese, who competed to have the finest things from the greatest artists and craftsmen of their time.
Pierced and set with cornelians, the solid gold plaque is modelled in relief with a scene depicting Atalanta hunting the great boar that had laid waste the lands of King Oineus, sent as a punishment for his failure to give thanks to Artemis after a successful harvest. At the heart of the lively scene, Atalanta has just fired the arrow that will bring down the boar. This classical Greek legend was popular with Renaissance artists.
Simon knew the legend and, more importantly, he knew of similar gold plaques in a museum in Berlin. He suggested that together they formed a set of six, originally intended to be mounted on a magnificent ebony cabinet made for the Borghese family. At some point, the cabinet had been lost or destroyed, but the plaques had survived, despite being made of gold. At one time the plaques were attributed to Cellini, but Simon knew that this was not now the case, though he was unable to identify the actual maker.
The owner knew little, except that it had been bought by her father in a sale at a time when such wonderful things were still accessible to a collector. Valued at £50,000 in 1991, this Renaissance gold plaque would now fetch at least ten times that, or even very much more.
‘I know nothing about it – it just lives on the mantelpiece. It isn’t even insured.’
When the Roadshow visited Birmingham in 2000, the highlight of the day turned out to be a small pottery head and shoulders model of a Turk wearing a turban. Crudely modelled and brightly coloured, it seemed at first sight to be only of limited interest. However, John Sandon knew better, recognising it at once as an extremely unusual example of early English Delftware.
Delft is a widely used term to describe earthenware covered with an opaque, white, tin glaze and then freehand painted in blue and other colours. Also known as faience and maiolica, this type of pottery was made in many countries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Holland were the main centres of production, with the term Delft, or Delftware, reflecting the Dutch origins of many of the styles, shapes and designs. The inspiration was mostly Far Eastern, with the white-glazed pottery being a crude attempt at imitating the look of white Chinese porcelain. At the same time, the Middle East was also important, with many styles echoing the period of Islamic domination in southern Europe.
AN EXTREMELY RARE EXAMPLE
Dutch and Italian potters probably brought the technique to Britain in the seventeenth century and, for a while, blue and white and polychrome Delftware was the most significant type of pottery made in Britain between the 1650s and the early eighteenth century. It was then replaced by the much improved white earthenwares and creamwares developed in Staffordshire from the 1730s. There were a number of Delftware production centres, although the main ones were in London, Liverpool and Bristol. Most potters produced functional domestic pottery, plates, dishes, bowls, mugs and tiles, with blue being the dominant colour. However, ceremonial chargers and punchbowls were also made, some with complex polychrome decoration that sometimes echoed Chinese styles and others with royal portraits or biblical scenes.
The young lady owner who had brought in the Turk figure knew nothing about it, other than that her aunt had lived in the same house since the 1920s, and had always had it on the mantelpiece until she died, aged 94. When the owner inherited
