Museum accessions.(English silverwork collection)(Brief Article)

About twenty years ago Alan and Simone Hartman began collecting English silver, focusing on works in the baroque and rococo styles. The net result, one of the finest such private collections in the world, has recently been acquired by partial gift and purchase by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which already possessed exceptional holdings of English silver of other periods. Today the museum can boast one of the most comprehensive surveys of English silver from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in the United States.

The Hartman Collection is particularly strong in the work of Huguenot and other foreign-born silversmiths who began to bring innovative designs and techniques to London in the second half of the seventeenth century As Christopher Hartop discusses in The Huguenot Legacy: English Silver 1680-1760, from the Alan and Simone Hartman Collection (Thomas Heneage, London, 1996), the time was ripe for a flowering in English silver. The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 sparked a period of great economic growth. Demand from the aristocracy, gentry, and a growing number of prosperous merchants at the top of the social scale fueled an intense market for luxury silver, one driven by a desire for new styles and forms. The influx of Huguenot silversmiths came just at the right moment to fill these needs, and in the process stimulated a period of unsurpassed creativity in English silver:

The Torah, a scroll containing the five books of Moses, is central to Jewish law and learning. As a mark of respect and veneration, Torahs are often decorated, and a crown is frequently part of this adornment One of the most magnificent such crowns has recently been presented to the Gilbert Collection by Sir Arthur Gilbert, in celebration of the collection's first anniversary at Somerset House in London. Illustrated below, the crown is made of gold and set with rubies, emeralds, diamonds, turquoises, and amethysts. It was probably made in Vienna about 1825 and is said to have originally been for the private use of Rabbi Israel Ruzhin, whose establishment in Ruzhin (in modern-day Ukraine) was known for its opulence. A rare gold and bejeweled article of Jewish ritual art, the crown matches the quality of workmanship that is the hallmark of the Gilbert Collection's holdings.

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