This book, a companion volume to Hugh Honour's Cabinetmakers and Furniture Designers, consists of fifty studies of goldsmiths and silversmiths often nations and eleven centuries. They range in date from Vuolvinus, maker of a gold and silver altar in ninth-century Milan, to Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who studied at the Bauhaus and is one of the outstanding industrial designers of our time. Sculptors and painters who worked in precious metals are included, as well as the makers and designers of ordinary household plate. World-famous craftsmen - Benvenuto Cellini, Wenzel Jamnitzer, Paul Revere, and Carl Fabergeare studied, together with such less well-known figures as Johann Melchior Dinglinger, creator of exotic fantasies for Augustus the Strong of Saxony; Philip Syng, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin; Francois-Desire Froment-Meurice, who was highly praised by Balzac and Hugo; and Charles Robert Ashbee, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement.

By investigating the lives of individuals, the author has been able to indicate the social standing of craftsmen in. different countries and periods, showing how the goldsmith gradually lost his medieval position as the most highly esteemed of all artists and sank to the level of an artisan. He suggests how craftsmen were affected by economic pressure, especially in the early Renaissance, when several who began their careers as goldsmiths became, and achieved more lasting fame as painters or sculptors.

GOLDSMITHS AND SILVERSMITHS includes accounts of men who played a part in the industrialization of the silver trade - Matthew Boulton and George Richards Elkington (the inventors of electroplating) in England, Charles Christofle in France and Henry Gooding Reed in the United States. The attempts to revive craftsmanship in the nineteenth century are analyzed. The book also reveals how each craftsman was influenced by and sometimes influenced - stylistic changes in the other arts. The photographs, many of which have been specially taken for this book, show a representative selection of the gold and silver objects made by or in the workshops of the various great metalworkers. Illustrating notable pieces in public and private collections in Europe and the United States, they provide a vivid account of the development of the goldsmiths' art from the Carolingian period to the present day.