New Perspectives on the Workshop of Gustave Stickley

Sheffield Plate

Bertie Wyllie

1907

2020.1

Gift of David and Susan Cathers in Honor of Bernadette Rubbo

While The Craftsman served as the principal voice for the Arts and Crafts movement in America, it still spoke to a variety of disparate interests and nowhere was this more evident than in the book reviews. Although Stickley had abandoned the Colonial Revival styles that dominated much of his work prior to 1900, the review of "Sheffield Plate" that appeared in the August 1908 issue of the magazine demonstrates that for some of his audience, their love of the Arts and Crafts and an appreciation of antiques and desire to collect them were not mutually exclusive. Referring to Wyllie's book as "not so much a history of Sheffield plate as it is a textbook whereby genuine pieces may be distinguished from imitations," the reviewer found the book "more useful to the collector than the general reader." The inclusion of reviews like this signal a broader readership for the magazine than just purists whose only passion was the Arts and Crafts movement.

Sheffield plate was a process of silver plating that was discovered accidentally by Thomas Boulsover in 1743. In essence, silver is fused onto a copper core and the resulting "sandwich" of metals behaves very much like silver but requires a fraction of the cost for materials.