This book examines the art of the gold box in 18th and 19th century Europe. Distinguished international scholars explore the contributions made by individual workshops in major European centres of production in the context of contemporary patronage and the international market for such boxes. Consideration is given to the design of gold boxes with reference to the V&A's important collection of design drawings. Leading experts explore the ways in which different techniques of gold box decoration -- portrait miniatures, gems, enamels, mosaics and hard-stones -- were developed. Contributors to the volume include experts from Amsterdam, Berlin, Dresden, London, Munich, New York, Paris, Rome, and St Petersburg. Senior museum curators, auction house specialists and independent scholars illustrate and discuss examples from private and public collections in their cities and elsewhere. The result is a unique record of the state of knowledge on the European production of gold boxes and of the history of collecting. This book will appeal to international collectors, scholars, dealers, museum curators and museum visitors, and all those interested in gold and silver fine art.

"Beyond the Border" sets the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in the context of the different societies in which they lived and worked. Distinguished international scholars explore the contributions of individual goldsmiths drawing on new research. Michele Bimbenet Privat examines the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in France during times of tolerance of the Protestant religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. She explains how protestant craftsmen dominated regional centres but found establishing a presence in the metropolis more challenging. The influence of the Louis XIV style was greater on the leading Dutch goldsmiths in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast to London, first generation Huguenot goldsmiths played only a minor role in their adopted cities of The Hague and Amsterdam. Those who settled in Berlin and Kassel, often from Metz in Northern France, made a greater impact through the purity of style in which they continued to work in the 18th century. Those who settled in the English speaking world benefited from ambitious patronage from noble and professional clients. Goldsmiths who settled in the American colonies had more in common stylistically with those who worked in Dublin and Cork. First generation Huguenot goldsmiths in London set the pace for the next generation which produced in Paul de Lamerie one of the most successful craft businesses of his generation. "Beyond the Border" explores the transatlantic links between the Huguenot goldsmiths who settled in Europe and America.

This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices; sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

The value of inventories in charting how houses were arranged, furnished and used is now widely appreciated. Typically, the listings and valuations were occasioned by the death of an owner and the consequent need to deal with testamentary dispositions. That was not always so. The inventory for Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, for example, was drawn up to make a claim following the house's devastation in the 1798 uprising. Mostly hitherto unpublished, the inventories chosen give new-found insights into the lifestyle and taste of some of the foremost families of the day. Above stairs, the inventories show the evolving collecting habits and tastes of eighteenth-century patrons across Ireland and how the interiors of great town and country houses were arranged or responded to new materials and new ideas. The meticulous recording of the contents of the kitchen and scullery likewise sheds light on life below stairs. Itemized equipment required for the brewhouse, dairy, stables, garden and farmyard reflects the at times significant scale of the communities the houses supported and the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency at some of the demesnes. A comprehensive index facilitates access to the myriad items forming the inventories, while the books listed at three of the houses are tentatively identified in separate appendices. A foreword together with short preambles to the inventories set the households in their historical context. Illustrated with contemporary engravings of the houses and with portraits of the owners of the time, the inventories will appeal to country-house visitors, historians of interiors, patronage, collecting and material culture as well as to scholars, curators, collectors, creative designers, film directors, bibliographers, lexicographers and novelists. The eighteenth century is the period onto which the Knight of Glin directed his penetrating gaze as art historian. The book is dedicated to his memory.

Boughton House in Northamptonshire is a house of contrasts. Its magnificent, and at the same time, formal exterior in the French style gives little hint of the rambling Tudor manor house embedded within. Involvement with the law and politics at the highest level generated the wealth of its founders and builders, but enlightened artistic patronage and a strong aesthetic sense have been characteristic of many generations of the Dukes of Montagu and of Buccleuch since the 17th century. This book looks at the house and its furnishings.