Charles Ashbee silver coffee pot
Price range: Sold
For sale is a Guild of Handicraft silver coffee pot London 1904. Designed by Charles Ashbee for Hungarian aristocrat Tsombor de Szasz. The wooden handle is designed as a fish or mythical sea creature. The design for this coffee pot appears in Ashbee’s book “Modern English Silverwork.” Plate 34. Ashbee designed many pieces of silver and furniture for Tsombor de Szasz, a patron of his.
Maker: Guild of Handicraft
Designer: Charles Robert Ashbee
Date : 1904
Marks: G of H Ltd, London, date letter “i”, to body and lid
Material: Sterling silver, wood handle
Condition: Good. The wirework finial is slightly mis-shapen. The handle has some restoration.
Size: 22cm tall
Weight : 453 grams
Additional Information
A remarkable survival of a note in Ashbee’s Journals makes reference to de Szasz and quite probably this coffee pot. Ashbee is staying at the Hotel Belle Vue, Attila utca, Budapest. A letter from Elsa de Szasz (Tsombor’s wife) welcoming him and confirming her address as 13 Szentharomsag utca survives with a handwritten note by Ashbee to the reverse. Ashbee has written “up in old Buda where the de Szasz are charmingly placed in a really delightful 18th C house in the baroque quarter…… It is interesting to observe how the Hungarian aristocrats – I have met several now in Elsa de Szasz’s pleasant little salon (where is all our Guild furniture and silver, having survived the Bolshevik revolution though a bit battered!) – have escaped into the heights and are remaking their broken world.”
The visitors book held at Harts’ Silversmiths, Guild of Handicraft, Chipping Campden, shows that Else de Szasz visited the Guild on 3rd August 1906. Was it perhaps to collect her newly made silver!
See Alan Crawford, “C.R. Ashbee”, Yale University Press
| Period | Art nouveau, Arts and crafts |
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