Enfilade

From Four Courts Press:

Alison FitzGerald, ed., Studies in Irish Georgian Silver (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2020), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1846827990, €50.

Irish silver, for long renowned among collectors and connoisseurs, is increasingly being considered as an aspect of the material world of the past. Its making, acquisition and use tells much about past attitudes and behaviour. At the same time, careful examination of surviving articles not only adds to appreciation of the design and craftsmanship but also to Ireland’s participation in international fashions. This volume, with new research by established and emerging scholars from Ireland and the UK, advances the study across a broad range. The contributions examine the circumstances in which silver objects were made, sold, valued, and dispersed in Georgian Ireland. It considers specialized branches of the trade including the production of freedom boxes and jewellery, the sourcing of metals and materials, the value of inventories as evidence, and regional patterns and preferences. This book builds on recent literature on the history of silver, second-hand markets, guilds, and luxury goods, to recover and reconsider Ireland’s silversmithing.

Alison FitzGerald is associate professor in history, Maynooth University. She has published widely on the history of Irish silver, including a monograph, Silver in Georgian Dublin: Making, Selling, Consuming (London, 2016), and an essay in the catalogue Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690–1840 (New Haven, 2015).

C O N T E N T S

• Toby Barnard, Silver: Mined and in Mind
• Damian Collins, The Production and Supply of Gold and Silver Boxes in Late Stuart and Georgian Dublin
• Tessa Murdoch, Elite Gift Exchange: A Royal Christening Gift for Lady Emily Lennox in the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection and Christening Gifts in the V&A Collections
• Thomas Sinsteden, The Dukes of Ormondes’ Silver Inventories, 1674–1715
• Jessica Cunningham, ‘Taken or Destroy’d’: The Silver at Castlecomer House and the Irish Rebellion of 1798
• Breda Scott, Jewellery in Georgian Dublin, 1770 to 1830
• Zara Power, Jewellery in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: From the Staple to the Sublime to the Sentimental
• John R. Bowen, Irish Provincial Silver in the Georgian Period
• Alison FitzGerald, Plate, Plated Wares, Plotting, and Proposals: Matthew Boulton’s Irish Correspondence