Badge in honor of the Sheffield Society of Artists

* Nearly 20,000 images of artworks the museum believes to be in the public domain are available to download on this site. Other images may be protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights. By using any of these images you agree to LACMA's Terms of Use.

Badge in honor of the Sheffield Society of Artists

1903
Jewelry and Adornments; badges
Enamel on gilded copper, silver
3 5/8 × 2 1/2 × 1/4 in. (9.21 × 6.3 × 0.64 cm)
Decorative Arts and Design Council Fund (M.2016.136)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

...
A distinguished metalworker and teacher, Alexander Fisher played a central role in the early twentieth-century revival of enamelwork in Britain. During his studies at the progressive South Kensington schools in London, Fisher attended a series of lectures on enameling by Sèvres craftsman M. Louis Dalpeyrat and enthusiastically took up the art form. Fisher taught and wrote extensively on enameling and is responsible for training many of Britain’s leading practitioners in the period.  In 1903, Fisher made this remarkable badge (or pendant). It was commissioned in honor of the Sheffield Society of Artists’ reorganization that year, probably by a Society member. This incredibly well documented design was illustrated twice in Britain’s most prominent art journal, the Studio (first as a drawing and then as executed), and it was specifically described there in 1904. As T. Martin Wood discussed in his 1904 profile on Fisher for The Studio, the badge featured "white roses for York and a peacock for beauty; the recent birth of the society is represented by the edge of the Sun appearing to rise above the design. In addition to this iconography, the work also included the Sheffield coat of arms as well as the art society’s insignia and motto "Ars Omnium Lingua" (art of all language). Fisher’s use of gilded copper here seems a particularly fitting celebration of an artists’ group in Sheffield, a city known for its manufacture of plated metalwork. Abbey Chamberlain Brach, Curatorial Assistant, Decorative Arts and Design, 2016
More...