NEW YORK, NY.- On October 20, Rago, Wright, and Toomey & Co. will present The Joel and Carole Bernstein Collection of Arts & Crafts Silver, a dedicated auction celebrating one of the most distinctive chapters in the history of British decorative arts. Featuring more than 100 lots, the collection encompasses clocks, vessels, caskets, tableware, jewelry, and other objects by leading designers and makers including Charles Robert Ashbee, Archibald Knox, Omar Ramsden, Kate Harris, Harold Edwin Landon, Jessie M. King, Bernard Cuzner, and A.E. Jones, together with significant works associated with Liberty & Co. and the Guild of Handicraft.
Joel and Carole Bernstein began collecting Arts & Crafts silver in the 1990s after Joel encountered British silver while traveling to London for business. Already devoted art collectors, the Chicago couple became fascinated by the historical context of the objects and the designers responsible for their inventive forms, gradually assembling a collection that included rare works by many of the movement's most important figures. Rather than treating silver as precious works to be kept apart, the Bernsteins incorporated it into their daily lives: pieces filled bookshelves and tables throughout their residence, while silver picture frames held family photographs alongside their significant figurative art holdings. Recent exhibitions of the Bernsteins' art collection, which features works by notable modern and contemporary artists, have led to a greater appreciation of their connoisseurship.
The silver that the Bernsteins collected is artful in its own right. Arts & Crafts designers in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century sought to reaffirm the importance of skilled craft and the individual maker. Charles Robert Ashbee, influenced by the ideas of William Morris, viewed the revival of silversmithing not simply as an aesthetic pursuit but as a form of social reform. Among many fine examples, the Bernstein Collection includes Ashbee's chalice with lid (est. $12,000–18,000). Yet the movement also maintained a productive relationship with industry, particularly through Liberty & Co.'s influential Cymric and Tudric lines, in which Archibald Knox and other designers combined Celtic motifs, colorful enamels, historical references, and strikingly modern silhouettes. Knox was also a wonderful maker of jewelry and the sale boasts his necklace in yellow gold with rubies, diamonds, enamels, and a cultured pearl pendant (est. $8,000–12,000).
The Bernstein collection demonstrates the remarkable breadth of this period, when designers freely reinterpreted historical traditions while absorbing contemporary influences from Britain and continental Europe. Whereas Ashbee adapted Renaissance forms for tazzas, chalices, and salt cellars, Omar Ramsden drew upon earlier European traditions while developing a highly individual approach to ornament. Ramsden's George V casket is one of the standout lots in the sale (est. $7,000–9,000). Art Nouveau provided another important source of experimentation, particularly in the work of Kate Harris, whose designs united British craft with the sinuous forms and "whiplash" lines associated with French Art Nouveau. Harris' figural jardinière on offer is a marvel of silver design (est. $4,000–6,000). These varied approaches reveal a movement less constrained by doctrine than energized by meticulous skill, historical knowledge, and imaginative reinterpretation.
In an informative catalog essay, scholar Glenn Adamson explains: "Ensuing generations of silversmiths—whether exponents of Art Deco, Modernism, and even Conceptual Art—would reinvent their vocation time and again. Never more, however, would they really be motivated to challenge mainstream silversmithing, for that once prodigious current was running increasingly dry. In British Arts & Crafts silver, uniquely, we find not only a triumphant recapitulation of the discipline's glorious past, but also a spirit of avant-garde challenge. Silversmithing, at that time and place, was something worth fighting for."
Ultimately, The Joel and Carole Bernstein Collection of Arts & Crafts Silver presents British silversmithing at the intersection of tradition and modernity. Created before changing social customs and the decline of formal dining contributed to the contraction of Britain's historic silver industry, these objects represent both the culmination of centuries of technical expertise and a challenge to conventional design. For the Bernsteins, their appeal lay precisely in that union of artistry and craftsmanship—a quality that allowed the works to coexist naturally with the paintings and sculptures that surrounded them at home. The October 20 auction showcases the Bernsteins' spirit of curiosity while demonstrating the enduring inventiveness of Arts & Crafts silver.
