What makes it Good?

Let's begin the little bloggie by tackling a big question. Why are some flatware patterns considered to be great, and valued on the secondary market at a premium of ten or more times their silver value, when the vast majority of second hand silver carries no premium at all beyond scrap? Here's a good rule of thumb: the more three dimensional a pattern is, the greater likelihood that it has some appreciable value in the marketplace.


Why is this? Pattern silver as we now know it was launched by the die rolling process, patented by Michael Gibney in the mid 1840's. There are those who might make a case for an earlier beginning in the swaged decorations used on fancy back spoons during the Colonial era, but this primitive flat steel die could only make one imprint at time when struck by hand with a hammer blow. Die rolling allowed for the first mass production of pattern silver, but few of those early efforts such as Tuscan, Gibney, or Mayflower are now sought by collectors. Move forward about forty years, and contrast this with the work of Antoine Heller, arguably the greatest flatware designer of all time. Heller was trained as a sculptor, and his work in bas relief




evokes an uncanny sense of three-dimensionality.

But why settle for an illusion, when you can have an actual sculpture in silver, albeit a miniature, grace your dinner table? That will have to serve as fodder for our next posting...