by Bill Jackman
Thomas Evesdon, another great toymaker of his time, contributed a three-legged silver pot, which was made in 1713. The maker’s mark, as it became known, was another addition to the hallmarks required by law to help prevent fraud. In many cases only the maker’s mark is visible. This does not always mean that the piece was made by him, but that it is attributed to his workshop. Some toys were so tiny that they might only have the maker’s mark on them, and some were excused having any hallmarks because they were so minute, and the impress marks could damage a delicate piece of silver.
Another fine distinguished silversmith was Augustus Courtauld. He registered his mark in 1708 at the London Assay Office, and opened his workshop in Church Street, St Martin’s Lane. He was another very fine maker of toys, and produced them in an enormous quantity, considering the limitations imposed by working conditions on silversmiths in those days.
He specialised in the production of toys though his high output meant he had to take on another full-time assistant whose work was of an equally high standard. After 1740 he no longer fully hallmarked his work, but resorted to using only his initials AC, which was his registered silvermark. These can be found stamped two or three times on pieces of his work.
The production of silver toys peaked in the eighteenth century. David Clayton, who only made silver toys, specialised in this field. His work was of such high standard that it was always in great demand and the quality of his work was unsurpassed, except for the work of George Manjoy, a silversmith who was a lot older than Clayton. There is no doubt that David Clayton was the most outstanding toy manufacturer in his day.
The demand for miniature toys made of silver was such that many silversmiths made the manufacture of them an important part of their trade. David Clayton made nothing else. Another silversmith was John Sotro, a craftsman whose work was in great demand in the years 1720 to approximately 1750. He advertised on his business card the fact that toymaking was a large part of his trade. The card read:
Goldsmith and Toyman making all sorts of toys at reasonable rates
In Bath, Cheltenham and several other spas where wealthy people came to take the water, there were retailers of silver toys. One such retailer was Deards, though it is probable that the goods were manufactured in London by the same company who were silversmiths.
The Deards were a popular family of silversmiths in London. A large part of their trade was the manufacture of good quality toys. A succession of family members were engaged in the manufacture of miniature silver toys. John Deards, the man who started the business, died in 1731 and worked in Fleet Street.
Another toymaker whose work was respected was Paul Daniel Chevinex (he registered his mark with the Society of Goldsmiths in 1730). He not only made toys out of silver, but would completely furnish a customer’s doll’s house in silver toys the way they wanted it.
Entered in Sir Ambrose Heal’s London Goldsmiths[4] are listed the goldsmiths of London and there are about 7000 names, However, there are only 30 described as ‘toymen’. This is despite the fact that toys were very sought after. The skill in making them was limited to the specialists. Any toys one might find with hallmarks of George II – or even better George I – should be treasured as they are rare and very valuable.
8 Dutch Silver Toys
The history of the Dutch hallmark is much more complex than the English hallmark system, in that they never adhered to the rules regarding what should be marked on their finished pieces of silver. It appears that silversmithing was crafted in Holland about the mid seventeenth century. There is no denying that the first early toys on record were made in France and Germany, but their silversmiths did not continue to do so; in fact, many of them came to Amsterdam to continue making toys. The doll’s house also became popular in Holland in the latter half of the eighteenth century and there is no doubt that it was this that caused the adult population to collect silver toys to decorate their doll’s houses, which became their pride and joy.
It wasn’t until the late fifteenth, early sixteenth century that legislation was issued by, first of all, Archduke Maximilien, and later in 1503 by Phillip IV (Philip the Fair) that silver and gold products should become hallmarked. This was obligatory and all were expected to comply by marking their work with their own individual mark. The easiest one to recognise today is the Amsterdam mark which consisted of three small ‘x’s with a crown on top, inside a rectangular escutcheon. This mark is very common and was used by many smiths to denote their toys to show they had been made in Amsterdam, when in fact they hadn’t been, so one needs further evidence before being sure that what they have is a treasure toy by a distinguished maker.
It is possible to overlook a silver miniature made by a famous silversmith of the day because he had not stamped it with his mark, or because he didn’t comply with the changes of legislation on silver marking, and continued mixing the old mark of a personal symbol, like a rabbit, a deer or a tree, with his initials. As a result, many eighteenth-century pieces are unmarked but are recognised as being antique. It is worth looking out for the date code letters, usually boldly stamped on the toys. They are generally in alphabetical order and changed each year. This was used to show the year of manufacture.
This practice has been in use since 1528. The Dutch lion rampant was another mark which had to be added as from 1663. This brought the total to four statutory marks that had to be made on pieces of gold or silver. A collector would be fortunate to find a toy with all four marks. Many silvermakers only left the town mark, and there were those that left nothing. Considering there were so many silversmiths operating in Holland only a few are known with a reputation for greatness, though most of the others, many of whom are unknown, were skilled craftsmen.
One of the early silversmiths whose mark is worth noting is Pieter ter Haer. His mark was a sand glass in an upright oval. A very concise display of Dutch hallmarks and the name of the silversmiths to whom they belonged, can be found in Victor Houart’s book Miniature Silver Toys.
Dutch hallmarks
One will find when inspecting pieces of Dutch silver – apart from vague makers’ marks and year dates which are impossible to trace – tiny individual sword marks. There are basically three of them. The smallest shows the piece was made between 1814 and 1905; the larger one shows it was made between 1906 and 1953; the third and largest sword has a number (usually 835) showing the silver grade dates from 1953 and this is still in use today. It is important to know these as it will save hours of exasperation trying to find if a toy is by a well-known maker and worth a four-figure sum. The other mark which tells you straight away if the toy is scarce is the dolphin stamped on it. This mark was used on gold and silver from 1859 to 1893.
The making of silver toys was not limited to Amsterdam. In fact the outlying towns, or Frisian towns of the Low country of Holland, were producing silver toys well before Amsterdam, but because of lack of knowledge collectors and connoisseurs have not rated these towns and their silver work with any degree of importance.
There is a school of thought that Leeuwarden (the capital of these Frisian towns) was actually producing silver toys in the sixteenth century. This, according to Victor Houart, is not true. Yet it is surprising that these little villages in a rich agricultural area, of no great importance to tourists, did manage to manufacture miniatures, in silver, of the tools and implements they used in everyday life. There must have been a local demand for these miniatures from local people who could afford to buy them.
In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, there is an excellent example of Dutch doll’s house silver, especially in the Lady Henriques collection (see below, Figures 107 and 108, p. 106). This is in contrast to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, which has very few tea drinking toys, and whose silver toys tend to be larger. These were undoubtedly meant as playthings for children, or glass cabinet display toys, which were not to be played with.
9 Doll’s Houses
There is no record as to who built the earliest doll’s h
ouse, but there is an inventory of one that was made in Nuremberg for Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1558. It was originally intended for his daughter but when it arrived he decided that it was far too nice a toy for her and put the house in his own art collection. The doll’s house would almost certainly have contained toys made of silver.
It was roughly 50 years later that doll’s houses of German design started taking shape. Christopher Weigel is known to have written in 1698.
The materials of which these dolls and playthings are made are in part silver and are fashioned by gold and silversmiths. […] Indeed, there is scarce a trade in which that which usually is made big may not often be seen copied on a small scale as a toy for playing with. (Poliakoff, 1980, p. 7)
The desire of adults to buy doll’s houses started in Germany, spread to Holland and fifty years later became established as an English hobby, primarily for adults, or so it is assumed.
In England, during the eighteenth century, the doll was already established as a child’s baby, so that when doll’s houses appeared in England they were called baby houses. There are many superb examples of doll, or baby, houses in the museums of the United Kingdom. There is a fine collection of baby houses or doll’s houses at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, London. In fact the Westbrook baby house which was once in the Victoria & Albert Museum has now been moved to the Bethnal Green Museum.
The wealthy Englishmen returning home from the continent brought with them the Dutch ideas of having portioned cabinets standing on legs, out of range of sticky-fingered children, where the adults could view and keep their treasured possessions. These cabinets were similar to the Dutch doll’s house, except their doll’s houses had two doors on them that when shut made them appear to be ordinary wooden cabinets. When the doors were opened all was revealed, a dazzling display of decorated and furnished rooms in the Dutch style. Those owned by the wealthy folk were furnished with gold and silver household fittings, while the lesser well off had to be content with brass and pewter.
In England, the tall secure cupboard for hiding adults’ treasures eventually had to give way to ‘squatters’, as children’s tiny dolls moved in. It was only a matter of time before the English doll’s house as we now know it came into being with its elaborate front of house decoration and opening out to display equally tastefully decorated interiors. These early doll’s house were usually locked, as many contained expensive silver furniture fittings, kitchen implements and utensils. Around 1700 the English decided it would be nice to have their baby houses with a full frontal view like an ordinary house with doors and windows, and so the modification began to what we recognise today as a doll’s house.
In the Geffrye Museum in London, there is a surviving doll’s house of the early proto type Dutch design, owned once by John Evelyn (see below, Figure 5, p. 62). These houses were exact replicas of actual houses of that period.
There was no limit to the extremes the owners would go to make their particular doll’s house as authentic as possible. The doll’s house of Petronella Oortman, built c. 1690 and now housed in the Rijksmuseum, even has silver displayed in her doll’s house cupboards, exactly as a bride would have her dowry. The money spent on furnishing these houses more than suggests that these doll’s houses were used extensively for amusement by adults.
Figure 4 An early Dutch doll’s house, c. 1800. Courtesy of Bethnal Green Museum.
Figure 5 John Evelyn’s doll’s house in Geffrye Museum, London.
The purpose of the original doll’s houses was educational, particularly in the kitchen. In 1631, Anne Koferlin not only had a doll’s house built but fitted it out as a training module. She published an explanatory leaflet teaching the future housewives the value of the kitchen components and how they were to be used.
It seems the attraction began to build from what was intended as a training aid, into an adult collectable hobby. Many women took pride in their baby houses and took them into marriage as their personal treasure. Once again England followed Holland which had their doll’s houses about fifty years before England did.
The arrival on the scene of doll’s houses in Holland and England justified the excitement of collecting silver toys. It was somewhere to put them, and it gave a purpose and justified the expense. With thousands of toys being produced in Holland, far more than they required for their own need, they exported toys to England. Germany, France, Holland and England were on good trading terms at that time, although in England we were making some toys our selves.
In the early eighteenth century the Duchess of Schwarzenburg created a baby house she called ‘Mon Plaisir’. It consisted of a hundred rooms and was supposed to represent daily life at court. Some ladies were so obsessed with their doll’s houses that they spent more money than they could afford on them. The ladies took their doll’s houses with them when they married, and continued building their collections. Frau Negges in Augsburg spent so much on her doll’s house that she financially damaged her estate. Arnoldus van Greffen and Frederick van Strant were the most prolific of the silver toymakers in Amsterdam at this time of the surplus. There is no doubt about it that as described on trade cards of that period, silver toys were being exported to London and Paris.
The English baby houses were a little later in becoming established in comparison to the Dutch, and they were smaller than the Dutch doll’s house. Despite the size of the houses, there were plenty of silver toys in England. The question is: what happened to them? Where did they go? There must have been at one time hundreds, if not thousands, of silver toys, including those we made ourselves and those which were imported from Holland,
We have in England our own baby houses, one of the most famous being the Westbrook house or Killer house, so named because it was donated by Mr Killer to the V&A Museum (see below, Figure 6, p. 64). It was built by tradesmen on the Isle of Dogs, London, and given to a small girl, Elizabeth Westbrook, as a present in 1705. A large handsome oak cabinet standing on its own six legs, it is decorated in the fashion of an eighteenth-century wealthy man’s house, and is fashioned in that style. There are many pieces of silver toys in it, including beds, fireplaces, pots, pans and kettles.
Figure 6 Westbrook doll’s house, showing the kitchen with silver miniature pots hanging on the wall. Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum.
Figure 7 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 today: £900.
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver Travels, confirms in his story in 1726 how the Queen of Brobdingnag ordered for Gulliver furniture for his convenience in his room. Gulliver goes on to relate:
I had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries which in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than those I have seen in a London toyshop for the furniture of a baby house.
This interest in doll’s houses was helped along by the collection of Queen Mary who presented her own doll’s house to the Museum of London. Queen Mary was also fortunate to be given two other doll’s houses, one being Titania’s Palace. This was given to her in 1922. This doll’s house was until recently on loan to Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset where the public was able to see it. The other was a doll’s house given to her by the nation in 1924 and designed by Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944). An eminent twentieth-century architect, he was commissioned by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to build a doll’s house for Queen Mary who was a very keen collector of the ‘tiny craft’. He gathered together the finest painters, silversmiths and skilled craftsmen to create what was known, when presented to Her Majesty, as ‘Queen Mary’s Doll’s House’ and which is still on display to the public at Windsor Castle. This house is the better of the two and contains a very impressive collection of very fine authentic Georgian silver toys from that period.
The doll’s houses themselves made excellent display cabinets. Apart from Holland and England, very little miniature silver was pr
oduced in the eighteenth century. America produced some silver toys. There is an eighteenth-century doll’s house in which there is a covered dish made by Peter Biermann in 1709. The doll’s house is in the Historisches Museum, Basle.
When equipping a doll’s house with furniture and tableware, even when keeping the objects to scale, the tableware was very tiny, yet items of furniture were made of silver and were naturally much larger, but still intended for the doll’s house. This is seen in the Westbrook doll’s house which is equipped with silver beds, fires complete with irons and tongs etc., wardrobes, tables, chairs and every item of kitchenware imaginable that was in use in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.
In other countries that made doll’s houses they didn’t have a problem, as they didn’t fit their doll’s houses out with silver furniture. The German doll’s houses, which were filled with pewter and copper utensils, were used as training aids, to teach girls how a house should be laid out and the utensils that were required to furnish it. The fittings in the doll’s house depended on the wealth of the owner as to whether it was brass and pewter or silver. The wealthy Hapsburg family had gold utensils in their doll’s house.
If proof were needed that the doll’s house was first and foremost a training aid then witness the following letter written in 1765 by a Mr Paul von Stetten:
Concerning the training of maidens, I must make reference to the playthings many of them played with until they were brides, namely the so called Baby Houses.