- Title
- Badge in honor of the Sheffield Society of Artists
- Date Made
- 1903
- Medium
- Enamel on gilded copper, silver
- Dimensions
- 3 5/8 × 2 1/2 × 1/4 in. (9.21 × 6.3 × 0.64 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2016.136
- Collecting Area
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Curatorial 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
