by Bill Jackman
Investing in
Antique Silver Toys
and Miniatures
By the same author
Non-fiction
Masonic Memorabilia for Collectors (2002)
Fiction
The Freemasons Daughter (2009)
Playing Away (in preparation)
The Elusive Mr Hooper ((in preparation)
Investing in
Antique Silver Toys
and Miniatures
William G. Jackman
aesop Collectables
Oxford
AESOP Collectables
An imprint of AESOP Publications
Martin Noble Editorial / AESOP
28 Abberbury Road, Oxford OX4 4ES, UK
www.mne-aesop.com
First paperback edition published by AESOP Publications
Copyright (c) 2011 William G. Jackman
The right of William G. Jackman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the copyright designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library.
First paperback edition 2011
Condition of sale:
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, sold or hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-9569098-0-0
The author is grateful to all who have kindly made their photographs available for printing in this book. Wherever possible he has made known the source of the photographs in the captions
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Lightning Source UK Ltd,
Chapter House, Pitfield, Kiln Farm,
Milton Keynes MK11 3LW
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xvi List of Illustrations xvii
1 A Short History of Silver 23
2 Hallmarks on Silver Toys 27
3 Dutch Dating Codes for Silver Items, 1815–1960 33
4 The Duty Mark 37
5 Silversmiths and Their Marks 39
6 A History of Silver Toys 43
7 How Silver Toys Were Made 51
8 Dutch Silver Toys 55
9 Doll’s Houses 59
10 English Silver Toys 67
11 The Present and Future of Silver Toys 75
12 Buying Silver Toys as an Investment 77
13 Where to Find Silver Toys 79
Illustrations 83
Bibliography 107
Appendix I: Museums to Visit 109
Index 111
About the author 119
I dedicate this book
to my three granddaughters
Sophie, Chloe and Kate
Preface
There is money to be made in investing in antique silver toys, and there is no reason at all that, unlike stocks and shares, they should ever drop in value. Furthermore, it is a hobby that very few people are aware exists, and little is known about the makers of the toys. As a result, there is plenty of scope for investigating the history of your hobby, and for still being able to find some choice silver toys dating back from the seventeenth century right up until the present day. The obvious snag is that the further back one goes the more expensive the toys become.
Interest in making tiny copies or miniatures of items in everyday use dates back thousands of years. It is conceivable that cavemen, not having silver at his disposal, whittled a wooden toy dinosaur for his child. Mankind always seems to have had a yearning and admiration for perfectly formed replicas of the larger full-sized original object, whether it be a picture, a piece of porcelain, glass or furniture, or as evidenced by the ‘oos’ and ‘aahs’ one gives when seeing a new baby. It is a built in delight we have of the Lilliputian-sized world we are so intrigued by and admire.
The purpose of giving a toy to a child was twofold: it not only amused the child, keeping it quiet and happy; but was also a learning aid – a model for the child to copy, based on its application by the child’s parents or the servants.
Nowadays we can add to this a third purpose: as a collectable and an investment
The craftsmen of the day liked to model items which were often made in their respective trades. Glassblowers would make tiny glasses; exact replicas of the originals, cabinetmakers would make tiny doll’s-house furniture, of a standard equal to, if not better than, the full-size original. The making of tiny objects was indeed a craft of love. It was, and still is, a fairytale world, as exemplified by, for instance, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which miniscule objects are a microcosm of the real thing.
It doesn’t matter what type of materials were used in the construction of the tiny replicas. European adults, have, since at least the seventeenth century, taken an interest in tiny toy objects they could display in doll’s houses or baby houses.
Although originally intended for children to use, these miniature toy replicas fascinated adults even more – so much so that the child was only allowed to see the interior of the doll’s house under the parents’ supervision, and with strict instructions that they could look but not touch.
It is the finished tiny copy that intrigues adults and makes them express admiration and childish delight when seeing a doll’s house fitted out with tiny copies of what they have only known until then as the real item. One can’t help admire the craftsmen that have gone to all that trouble to miniaturise a chest of drawers no bigger than a matchbox, or a fireplace with fire irons and fenders, all made of silver. It is not only children who are fascinated by tiny reproductions they can play with.
The parents sought new toys from the silversmiths, getting them to make something unique, especially for their collection. The gold and silversmiths, meanwhile, soon realised that there was a potential market in making tiny toys, especially in silver and gold, and many silversmiths, especially on the continent of Europe, began to specialise in this demanding craft of toymaking.
It was only the English who used the term ‘silver toys’ to describe our tiny copies of the original-sized objects. They were made originally as playthings. In Germany they are called silberspielzeuge; in Holland, the most prolific producer of silver toys, they are referred to as zilverspieelgoed.
This obsession with miniaturising everyday items has not diminished over the years, and even today there is a growing and demanding market, seeking even tinier and more accurate doll’s- house toys in gold and silver.
A person who might pass by a silver item such as a teapot in an antique shop would stop and admire and become ecstatic over a miniaturised copy of the same item. It is difficult to say exactly why we are so taken by tiny toys; perhaps we marvel at the skill of the craftsman who has had the patience to fashion a miniature; or maybe the human race is simply besotted with tiny things like babies, puppies and kittens – and baby toys have thus been accepted into the same category, just because they’re so cute.
From the history of toy miniatures it can be seen that Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States have shown a definite interest in tiny toys. However, other countries from time to time have produced the small silver toys, in particular China and Russia, but not in any profusion like the Dutch.
As well as usin
g the term silver toys, which were primarily toys that could fit to scale in a doll’s house, there was a second size of toy intended for a child to play with. These are referred to miniatures, or, as the Dutch say, miniaturesterm. Some of these miniatures are quite tall, reaching up to a third of the size of the original object they were copying.
Another school of thought is that, as well as making silver toys for doll’s houses which, as we have seen, seems to be the collecting prerogative of the parents, the silversmiths made toys in silver, scaled to the size of the child’s doll, as if the doll itself were using the toys.
There is proof of this fact in the painting, A Children’s Party by William Hogarth (1773) where children are seen playing with a seated doll, and, sliding off the collapsed table is a silver tea service, which is scaled to the size of the doll.
Figure 1 Painting by William Hogarth, c. 1730: A Children’s Party, showing a dog upsetting a child’s silver tea set (picture from an unknown private collection).
The doll’s-house silver and gold toys became more and more a toy or a collector’s hobby for the adult. However, as children liked playing with the same type of items their house servants and parents might use, there was also a market for these larger toys. The Dutch are on record as having produced silver toys from as far back as the late seventeenth century.
Silver toys were developed at least a hundred years before the appearance of the first doll’s houses. The first toys on record were soldiers and cannons made of gold and silver, created for the young Dauphin in France in the sixteenth century, although this does not necssarily mean that none existed before then; these early toys were replaced over the years with lead soldiers. There are unfortunately, no examples of these early soldiers, though written records of them do still exist in the museums of Paris and Antwerp. The main silver toys were of the type one would expect to find as household utensils and tableware and are still to be found in the doll’s houses in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, London. They were generally less than 1.5 inches (4 cm) high.
Thousands of these tiny silver toys were made in Amsterdam in the first half of the eighteenth century, and many of them are in museums around the world, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Art Institute in Chicago; and the Yale University Art Gallery; or they can be found in wealthy people’s collections.
The Dutch in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also made little silver displays, or tableaux of people and animals doing everyday things such as hunting, playing, fishing, walking, watching the theatre and the circus. They also made many kinds of wild animals and birds. In fact there was nothing they seemed to have missed as these silversmiths practised their art of producing a new novelty in silver. It is a delight to see how their imagination has expanded into making sets of coach and horses with and without passengers. They made sleighs, pulled by horses and oxen. The sleighs are often filled with tiny models of passengers and driver and, although the figures are no more than half an inch high, they are dressed in fashionable clothes of the period, and are not just seated in their transport, but carry umbrellas, swords and walking sticks. The Dutch made thousands of pieces, and exported many of them to England.
Today, although a profusion of eighteenth-century Dutch toys is still available, there is a scarcity of the toys made by the well-known master silversmiths whose work now demands four figure sums. This is the same for the two highly regarded English silversmiths of the eighteenth century: George Manjoy (whose first work of 1697 is now attributed to him after being erroneously attributed to other silversmiths) and David Clayton, certainly the highest producer of silver toys of the same period.
The third and definitely the most prolific of silver toys is what the Dutch refer to as e’tage’re zilver. These are little groups of men, women and children, either solo or in groups, going about their everyday life. They usually stand on little platforms and are about an inch high. There were thousands of these produced and many of the originals are still available, although copies are still being produced today in towns like Schoonhoven in Holland, which is known as Holland’s silver city, as there are so many shops selling silver and training schools for up-and-coming silversmiths.
The fourth type of toy produced were not toys at all, although they come into the same category and are very appealing to the collector. They are the sort of miniature display pieces which one would like to keep in a showcase. These showcase models are often intended to be operated by hand, but due to their delicate construction these moving parts were never intended as playthings. They were meant to show the owner how the parts were intended to move, and the clever handcrafted engineering involved in achieving it; there weren’t many toys that came into this category. Once again it must be pointed out that most of these toys have been copied as far back as the nineteenth century up until the present time, and apart from the makers’ marks (which in the case of Holland are difficult to figure out) the majority of pieces all look very much like the originals. The workmanship is still as perfect as when they were first made 200 years ago.
A great deal has been written and researched regarding the larger pieces of silver, but miniatures and toy silver have been sadly neglected. There seems, however, to be resurgence of interest, not so much by English silversmiths as by countries in the Far East who are capitalising on the collectability of miniatures, using in many cases 800-grade silver. Apart from the figure 800 which sometimes appears, there are no other maker’s marks. A great number of silver toys and miniatures are also made in the Far East with the 925 silver grades, although in most cases the workmanship is no better than the 800 grade.
The investor today can take heart that plenty of top-quality antique silver toys are still available, and as they become more scarce, prices will continue to rise. There is no need to buy shoddy, poor-quality silver toys, unless of course they take your fancy.
After all, a collector buys what he likes, although an investor may decide to wait until a better piece comes along. The toymakers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries deserve our gratitude for all the skill and technology they put into making tiny silver toys. Their skilful work has in the main stood the ravages of time, and far less of their toys and miniatures have finished back in the melting pot as has been the fate of their larger brothers.
Acknowledgments
I would like to say thank you to the following people:
My editor and publisher, Martin Noble
Silver Vaults, London, www.langfords.com
Miranda McLaughlan, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Amy Taylor at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Lily Canvin at the Christies Assay Office
Holland House of Silver Miniatures, www.silver-miniatures.com
Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, London
Geffrye Museum, London
The following three eBay sellers who let me use their pictures:
Gwenygems for the toast racks
Rebecca Emms and Edward Barnard for the George III teapot
Mattachewey for the elf with barrel
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Jinty for her paience and understanding.
William G. Jackman
Weston-super-Mare, 2011
List of Illustrations
Note
In the following list, due to the fact that hallmarking on the Continent of Europe was very haphazard and inconsistent when these toys were made, I have entered information which I am either certain is correct in some cases or judge to be correct in other cases.
Abbreviations
AC Author’s Collection
ac Date of acquisition
D Depth
Di Diameter
H Height
L Length
M Maker
P Price paid
Frontispiece: A Victoran kitchen, equipped with silver toys. AC.
Painting by William Hogarth, c. 1730: A Children’s Party, showing a dog
upsetting a child’s silver tea set. Unknown private collection. 18
Dutch date stamping system, 1814–1960. 33
Alphabetical hallmarks. 34
An early Dutch doll’s house, c. 1800. Courtesy Bethnal Green Museum of
Childhood. 61
John Evelyn’s doll’s house, in Geffrye Museum, London. 62
Westbrook doll’s house, showing kitchen with silver miniature pots
hanging on the wall. Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum. 64
The Victorian lounge in my doll’s house, using 25 pieces of silver from
my own collection which are a mixture of English and Dutch pieces.
Total value (2011): £900. 64
Small tea set and tray, M: Saunders & Sheperd, Birmingham, 1905, ac:
Sep. 2010, P: £236, AC. 82
Miniature taper stick, detachable sconce and snuffer, M: Yapp & Woodward, Birmingham, 1847, 23gm, ac: Sep. 2010, P: £140. AC. 83
Victorian silver dog, typical of those made in Schoonhoven, Holland, mid
19th c, no markings, 11gm, ac: June 2010, P: £35, AC. 83
Silver bench, no markings. Dutch, possibly late 18th c, L: 231mm,
18gm, ac: Dec. 2010, P: £67, AC. 83
Coffee pot, made in Amsterdam in 18th c, numerous unrecognisable
markings, H: 69mm, 39gm, ac: Jan 2010, P: £75, AC. 83
Miniature lamp designed as a child’s compact, complete with powder puff, Birmingham 1912, H: 70cm, 41gm, ac: June 2007, P: £85, AC. 84