Art
[AN EXIIIBITION OF COLLEGE PLATE AT OXFORD.]
THE remarkable exhibition of college plate in the Ashrnolean at Oxford is the more remarkable because it shows plate all of which (with a few exceptions) is still in actual and almost daily use. It has not therefore the atmosphere of a museum. The period covered is from 1340 to 1928. The whole course of. development of the art of the English silversmith and gold- smith can be traced. One signal merit is that the exhibition will appeal to the small collector as well as to the connoisseur of rarities because there is a well-made selection of pieces of the humblest character and of the most ordinary use. Of the pre-Reformation plate the palm must be given to the lovely. Corpus Salt, as perfect an example of an uneven period as could be found. But the real wealth of the exhibition is in the superb seventeenth-century silver tankards, such as the Kyre beer-mug from Balliol and the smaller Jacobean silver. Two works of Paul Lamerie, at a later date, show the extra- ordinary versatility of that master : one is an elaborate and ornate tureen, the other a punch-bowl of astonishing graee and line. Among the unique pieces the New College celadon bowl (e. 1500) is remarkable as being one of the three earliest pieces of this ware known. The Founder's Horn from Queen's. College is perhaps the most interesting piece, but the later additions to its mounting do not improve its appearance. A ease of modern silver by living metal workers serves rather as an epitaph on dead styles than as a hint of the dawn of new. Most of the pieces shown (with the exception of two or three) seem so deeply imbued with the regrettable traditions of the first ten years of this century, when so-called "Nouveau Art " was the rage, that there seems little or no hopeof a new
style, _ _ , One turns with a vast relief to the exquisite shapes of the
Jacobean and Queen Anne periods, when artists ,knect,how to
combine form with purpose, - ' - • - S. C.
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