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The basket is in the form of plaited ears of wheat. The pierced. rim foot is chased with trellised basketwork with plaiting above and below. The spreading sides are formed as forty groups of three ears of wheat plaited together, the curling ears forming the border. A band of reed-and-tie ornament is applied around the lower part of the basket. The underside of the plain base is engraved with a crest. The crest is that of Beckford, for William Beckford (1760-1844). He is best known for Fonthill Abbey, a vast "Gothick" mansion that he built in Wiltshire during the first decade of the nineteenth century and whose spire was taller than that of Salisbury Cathedral. He devoted himself to filling the house with works of art until 1822, when the failure of his West Indian sugar plantations forced him to sell the house and most of its contents to John Farquhar. Farquhar himself sold the contents in the following year in one of the most famous auctions of the nineteenth century. Beckford's taste for exquisite workmanship and sumptuous materials was largely out of tune with the times: William Hazlitt acidly described the house as "a Cathedral turned into a toy shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly and, at the same time, most worthless in the productions of art and nature". Although immensely wealthy, Beckford was a commoner and resented the fact. His greatest preoccupations were with his ancestry-both real and fictitious-and his long-sought-after peerage. In 1837 this obsession drove him to such lengths of absurdity as to argue in a letter that: "you will acknowledge that a man who, by infinitely rare co-incidence, is without exception descended from all the barons-yes, all-who signed the Magna Carta and whose issue still exists, will not be out of place in the House of Lords". Beckford's extensive patronage of contemporary silversmiths has been fully discussed by Snodin and Baker (1980), who identify more than two hundred pieces made for him. Beckford's plate may be divided into two broad categories: domestic and ornamental. Both groups are distinguished by their exceptional quality, but while the first is essentially in the accepted style of the day, the second is extraordinarily original. The earliest of his domestic silver dates from 1781 and was mainly by John Scofield and Smith and Sharp. Between 1788 and 1802, much of which time he spent abroad, he bought a number of pieces from the Parisian silversmith Henri Auguste. Most of the English domestic plate he subsequently acquired was made by a variety of silversmiths, including Paul Storr, and was supplied by the retailers Vulliamy and Company and Rundell, Bridge and Rundell. The quality of this plate alone suggests that Beckford took a keen interest in his commissions, but in the case of the ornamental silver made for his collection it is clear that he played a far more formative role. It would appear that Beckford himself was responsible for some of these designs, but many questions of detail were in practice left to his friend Chevalier Gregorio Franchi to resolve; these matters form much of the subject matter of the extensive correspondence between them. |
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