Losing the family silver
When stashing the family silver in a bank vault, make sure to keep the receipt! That’s exactly what an 18thcentury Mullingar family didn’t do. The 1798 Rebellion was brewing and, mindful of looting, wealthy Irish people were hiding their valuables. This particular family had a very lovely silver dressing table service. Made in Dublin by John Segar in 1685, it was already almost a century old, and just the kind of thing that would catch a looter’s eye. Sensibly, they sent it down to the La Touche bank in Dublin for safekeeping. Less sensibly, they lost the receipt. The dressing table service lay in the bank vault, like Sleeping Beauty, for 100 years.
Ironically, that century spent in a time capsule is what makes the silver so valuable today. Six items from the original service — an octagonal casket, a pincushion, a pair of covered boxes, a clothes brush and a hair brush — are coming up for auction at Christie’s Exceptional Sale, New York, on April 20. They’re estimated to sell for between $60,000 and $90,000 (€48,746 to €73,119).
Irish silver from the reign of Charles II is very rare and especially valuable when, like this one, it’s decorated with Chinoiserie flat-chasing (that’s low-relief ornamentation with a Chinese theme). Most 17th-century silver is so blurred that it’s hard to see the pictures. Usually, daily use has gradually rubbed down markings that were once crisp and clear. But this set — having spent a century in a time capsule — is looking remarkaperky.
“It’s been sitting in a collection in Boston, and nobody knew it was there!” says Jill Waddell, senior specialist in silver at Christie’s, New York. “When we went out to the house, the family had it all laid out with other pieces of Chinoiserie silver from the same time. We picked up one little box and noticed that it was Irish. Then the set grew under our eyes and we realised that we’d just walked in on the most wonderful treasure!”
The Irish dressing table set was purchased in London by a known collector, Richard Cushing Paine Sr (1893-1966) around 1930, and inherited by his son-in-law, John Constable (1927-2016). Its story had been lost in time. “The family really didn’t know what they had,” Waddell says.
Chinoiserie silver was a short-lived affair in Ireland, and was only made between 1680 and 1690. Early Chinoiserie is often hilarious because, although people liked the idea of the Orient, nobody knew what it actually looked like. Irish silversmiths were a long way from objects that actually came from China, and the decoration on the dressing table set is fantasy, pure and simple. The lot essay, based on research by Dr Thomas Sinsteden of the Dublin Assay Office, describes how: “The buildings to the top of the casket seem to recall an Eastern Orthodox church or a Turkish-style mosque, perhaps from “Tartary” around Ukraine or Southern Russia.”
The decoration, as Waddell explains, offers a wonderful insight into what a 17 th-century Irish silversmith thought that Chinese flora and fauna might look like.
“There are birds with ears, and little dragons, and animals that come completely out of the imagination. It also seems to have a narrative.” On one of the boxes, a lady greets her suitor from a balcony while a dragon drinks from a water fountain. The dressing table set was recovered from the bank vault when La Touche Bank was taken over by the Bank of Ireland around 1870 and restored to the Mullingar family, who may have been the Handcocks of Moydrum Castle, near Athlone. The IRA burnt Moydrum in 1921. Some accounts record that silver was stolen from the house; others claim that the IRA helped Lady Castlemaine and her daughter to remove their belongings, while, in a gentlemanly fashion, they burnt down their house.
Either way, the silver dressing table service made its way to the jewellers, Carrington and Co of London, where it was purchased by Richard Paine around 1930.
This may also be the time when the set was divided. In the late 1940s, three items from the same set — a mirror and two candlesticks — were on loan to the National Museum of Ireland. Their owner was Kurt Ticher, a Dublin-based German national and a collector of Irish silver. In 1962, the museum purchased the three pieces for a total of £1,500. Now, experts agree that there is no doubt that the National Museum of Ireland’s mirror and candlesticks were once part of the service presented at Christie’s.
“It’s an absolutely outstanding set!” says Audrey Whitty, Keeper, Art & Industrial Division at NMI. Other than that, she’s saying nothing. When significant pieces of Irish history come up at auction, the museum never reveals its hand. But wouldn’t it be great if the pieces were reunited?
See christies.com and museum.ie