Signature
This silver is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is a vignette on the silver makers over the past several hundred years. This display is a discussion of the maker’s mark and how it’s changed over the years and what different numbers and marks mean. Before the industrial age everything was made by craftsmen in their own shops, one at a time, and the maker’s mark identified the piece and was probably a little bit of advertising as well. I’m sure there are a few silver smiths who didn’t really need a mark, that their work was so beautiful it was recognized by people who loved the craft.
The industrial revolution brought on thousands of mass produced goods made in factories by anonymous people using molds and Henry Ford’s ideas of the assembly line and today we have plastics being pulled out of molds in countries we’ve never seen by people we know nothing about and it turns out that these people are polluting their world the way we polluted ours.
Mass production is a cheap fix and a way to produce goods at a lower cost and sometimes they can be of better quality, and some things like silver serving spoons, should continue to be made in shops by craftsmen and women. There is no reason to flood the market with expensive items that last forever, it’s best to leave the most beautiful items as the rarest.
Is it too late to argue for a craft based industrial movement?