The Cheapside Hoard

Sometime in the 1600’s, a goldsmith buried a stash of jewellry, possibly as he was heading off to the Civil Wars. It sat for several hundred years, until 1912, when it was discovered by workmen excavating a cellar floor in London’s Cheapside neighbourhood. They sold it to an antiques dealer who was known for paying workmen for the items they unearthed. More than 500 pieces made up the collection, and soon after it was discovered, it was sold off in bits and pieces, mainly to the Museum of London, but to others as well.

One hundred years later, the entire collection has been re-assembled in an exhibition at the Museum of London, where it will be until April of 2014.

Many of the pieces in the exhibition, including these pearl-cage pendants, are suspended in light which approximates the Jacobean and Tudor era candle-light.

I’ve picked some of my favourite pieces from the 400 to share with you. And if/when I am back in London in the spring, you can bet this will surely be on my list.

A deep green reliquary locket

Gilt brass watch with calendar indications, hour striking and an alarm. The watch is signed G. Ferlite of Geneva, which dates its creation somewhere between 1590 and 1635. It is the only signed piece in the collection.

A gold and diamond ring

Bow pendant with rubies

A small hinged pocket watch, undoubtedly the most amazing piece of the Hoard.

And to give you an idea of how small this piece is:

Amazingly, there are three counterfeit pieces in the Hoard made of glass and paste.

More information on the pieces in the Cheapside Hoard is here. And a lovely video is here.

Help Find This Mystery Man!

I got an e-mail from a reader asking me to help figure out who a specific man of mystery is. Since I don’t know, I thought I’d throw it out to you to see if you can help.

Here’s the background from RKMW:

We are looking to find out who the man on all of our door-knobs is. The house was originally built around 1850, renovated around turn of the century (doorknobs are in keeping with late 1800 to early 1900 style, so probably from turn of the century). Later renovations preserved architectural details (including the doorknobs).

We believe it was originally a single family home, but later came to be a "family hotel", and we've seen letters indicating that immediately after the 1904 fire, one of the counsel for the B&O Railroad either lived there or had offices there (or both).

The suspicion is that it is Mark Twain, and that all of the knobs were added during the early 1900’s renovation, but Twain doesn’t have a close enough connection with Baltimore for that to be the case – unless someone was a huge fan.

There’s an auction site with the same doorknob, describing it as Mark Twain, but I am still doubtful.

Because many of the early building records were destroyed during a massive fire that leveled Baltimore in 1904, it’s often hard to find early records. The house was designed by some “famous local architects”, so once I find out who they are, I can check some of our records at the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and see if there’s any information.

Here’s another view from an auction house that lists it as “thought to be Mark Twain”.

Usually, the images of Mark Twain have him with much wilder hair.

So, any thoughts to help identify our mystery man?

More Lettuce (sort of)

I wrote about the Lettuce Ware last week and right after that I went to a huge yard sale at the Greek Church close to my office, as I mentioned yesterday. One of the things that I picked up was two green leaf plates.

Not lettuce ware, but green majolica.

Of course, the first thing I did was flip them over, as I do to pretty much any china I see (that’s not in a private home!). I am always so interested in the maker’s marks. When I was looking up to see if I could find any information about plates similar to these, which are unmarked, I discovered that Wedgwood also made a lettuce leaf-style plate.

The Wedgwood pattern seems to come in several iterations including a dark green, a leafier green and white.

There also seems to be a huge price range on these plates on Ebay, ranging from $9.00 to $70.00 for one plate!

Some of the plates are lettuce/cabbage leaves and others are strawberry leaves.

I am always amazed that you hear or read about something, and then all of a sudden it appears everywhere! What fun!

Weekend Update: Late August

What a gorgeous weekend we had here in the mid-Atlantic. Clear, cool and cloud-free! In fact, on Saturday night, I was chilly. I had been at a dinner and we ate outside. Once the sun went down, the temperature fell to about 61* and I got a chill. I had to turn on the heated seats in my car on the way home! In August!!! Who’d have ever thought. The whole evening was worth every second, especially getting to meet the host’s newest acquisition, Miss Peale, on the left. The one on the right is going to live with friends! Not a whole lot cuter than a couple of eight-week old Jack Russells!

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I had planned to go to an auction on Saturday morning, but about halfway there, I decided that it was too pretty a morning to spend it inside at the auction rooms. There were really only a few lots that I was interested in, and they had high estimates on them or else there was more in the lot that I didn’t want than what I did want.

I’d have liked to swoop up this bar-cart, but I don’t really have a place in my house for it. Also, it was a bit too orange for me.

Maybe it was owned by the same person who owned these crazy Mid-Century Modern chairs!

I liked this lot of silverplate, but I still have a bunch of pieces from the last auction.

I did go to a yard sale Saturday morning and grabbed this fun piece.I haven’t decided what I am going to do with it yet. Any suggestions?

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Friday morning, I went to the huge annual yard sale at the Greek Church that’s a half a block from our offices. What a bonanza! Since I was practically the first person there, I got first pick. Isn’t there a whole genre of blogs of vlogs that just show the “haul” from a shopping trip? Ugh. There were three or four other rooms filled with furniture, books and baby and children’s gear. I am sure that they made a ton of money to support the good works that the church does – in fact, they were very generous to the children at the organization where I used to work.

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I want to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey I had last week. If you didn’t yet have a chance to answer the fewer than 20 questions, there’s still time. The survey is here. Anyone who fills out the survey before September 1st, and leaves their name, will be entered into a drawing for Mark Hampton’s On Decorating book. Your input will be invaluable as I move forward with Pigtown*Design! Thanks!

Lettuce Entertain You!

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal had a piece about Lettuce Ware, about which I was vaguely aware. Apparently, C.Z. Guest collected it and had tons of pieces of all sorts. This is some of her collection in her kitchen.

As you might expect, pieces like Lettuce Ware were produced in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. Doesn’t it seem like one of those things that Victorians would love? Of course, around the same time, Majolica from Portugal and Spain started coming into fashion as well, but it wasn’t as realistic as the English pieces.

American potteries such as Wanopee, a no-longer-existing Connecticut company, and Dodie Thayer, from Florida, produced Lettuce Ware. The Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Brooke Astor were all collectors of Dodie Thayer’s Lettuce.

JBKO’s 20 piece Dodie Thayer Lettuce collection went for almost $7,000 at auction, while Brooke Astor’s 218 piece collection went for over $75,000, even though the estimate was only $9,000! You’ve got to have a lot of confidence to serve a dinner on this, although I’d see it more as luncheon ware. And, of course, it would be only one of your sets of china!

If pieces like this one, on 1st Dibs are a little out of your price range, you can check Ebay and thrift shops for similar pieces. I recently found this small tureen at a local thrift shop. It’s marked “Holland”, so not the good stuff, but it’s a great little piece, nevertheless. It could start me on a whole new area of collections!

Click the links for articles about Lettuce Ware and Dodie Thayer.

Don’t Smoke!

I picked up two little Staffordshire Dogs at a sale this weekend. Honestly, I almost didn’t get them because of how filthy they were. I started cleaning the one on the right, and then thought I should take a picture to see the before and after shots.I scrubbed them a bit with dish detergent, but that didn’t do a thing. Because they’re not glazed, I thought I’d try a Magic Eraser®. Since I didn’t pay a lot for them, it wouldn’t really matter if they were ruined. But it worked like magic! Basically, the nicotine had put a coat of stain on both pieces. It had also given them a little bit of a shine. The very thought of living in a house that’s had that much smoke in it just makes me ill.

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This is another of the many things I did this weekend. I had a great old candlestick which had lost all of its silver-plate. I didn’t want to have it re-plated because it’s a but wobbly and as a finished piece, it wouldn’t be worth it. So I got a can of black gloss spray-paint and re-imagined the piece.

It’s actually in four parts, so I took them all apart and gave them a number of light coats of paint, turning after each coat to make sure all parts were covered. I think it turned out pretty well! If I do this again, I might take a rough sponge to the piece before I spray it to give the paint something to grip.

How was your weekend?

This and That

When I posted yesterday about our boating trip around the creeks near Baltimore, one of my commenters chided me for not reporting some wreckage I saw along the shoreline. Since it was a wood-hulled boat, I presumed that it had been there for decades, and that someone else had probably already rung it into the Department of Natural Resources. I also figured that since the Coast Guard is right along the other side of the creek, they might have noticed some rotting wood wrecks littering the creek. Turns out they’ve noticed it already and have even conveniently marked the location on the chart. I might sound like I am being sarcastic, but I’ve been reading navigational charts all of my life, and we had charts (in electronic form) on the boat. It’s essential that things like wrecks and submerged pilings, cables, buoys and marks, and any other impediments and aids to navigation are noted on the charts for reasons of safety. Of course, it’s a whole other thing if the boater doesn’t understand the chart, or what the symbols or lights mean. Tragedy comes of not knowing. Here.

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I am working with a researcher to find information on a man who was very influential in medicine in Baltimore for about 15 years. He was very involved in creating our medical library, at one time, the largest collection in the US. Of course, that necessitates hunting through our archives, which are only very loosely documented. But it’s fun to hunt, regardless. The other afternoon, we unearthed several files of old receipts which were just such fun to read. When you parse the sentences, they’re quite funny. They offer rates to both City and Country merchants. They have the most reasonable terms. And they take rags, which will be made into paper.

Here’s another classic one. Items will be made in a “Tasty and Faithful manner, with Dispatch”. As you can see, we got a lot of printing done, as we were publishing medical journals, books, pamphlets, and lists of members.

Most of them have beautiful engraving, either of their goods or their building. Others have some fanciful motif on them. But all of them are pretty small – most measure less than an inch or two in either direction. Here are some of my favourites.

Of course, how could I resist this one?

This one says that the stone used for the engraving will remain the property of the printer, who was still in business up until the last decade or so.

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I keep finding paintings around our offices, and today, I found this gal hanging on a wall.

None of the women in our portrait collection are marked with any identifying information. It really bothers me.

All for now! Ta!

Et Ce Que

This post is a little of this, a little of that.

First, thanks to everyone who gave me such great suggestions for the beets. I wrapped them in foil, and baked them until soft, and then they were simple to peel! I am marinating them in a bit of balsamic vinegar and will make a salad with them. I am slow cooking the cherry tomatoes until they’re “sundried” and then will put them in olive oil for use later. I am still trying to figure out a use for the three onions. Maybe an onion marmalade to make for the winter? I don’t have a dozen Weck jars for nothing!

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I am mad for the BBC show, Dr. Who. They filmed it in Cardiff when I lived there, and as shocking as it is for me to believe, I actually watch and like a SciFi show! I love seeing the places I knew and loved when I lived there and it makes me completely and totally homesick for my life in Wales. My car is even in one episode (Cybermen II), they filmed it on our street.Dr. Who’s been on and off the air for 50 years this year and after a hiatus of a dozen or so years, it started up again while I was in Cardiff. I would watch them film, and I adored the classically-trained lead, Christopher Eccleston.The Doctor regenerates every so often (usually when the actor playing him quits), and comes back as a brand new person. After two young-ish Doctors, we’ve got another mature one. Peter Capaldi, whom you may know from Local Hero or Dangerous Liaisons, amongst many other roles. His most well-known one is Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It. He’s absolutely the most foul-mouthed character, using the F-bomb as a noun, a verb and an adjective, sort of based on Rahm Emanuel. I love that they didn’t pick some pretty boy to play The Doctor, and that we might now be exploring his darker side, like they did when Christopher Eccleston played him. (dorkieness over now!)

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Shameless self promotion here: I am going to be adding lots and lots to my Etsy and Ebay pages in the next few weeks. I am just overwhelmed with what’s in my house and need to de-accession it before the next auction comes around at the end of the month. Lots of great Wedgwood jasperware pieces, silver and French Ivory cutlery and single pieces, some great old silver teapots, more blue and white, and brown and white china, fabrics, including Scalamandre and Lilly Pulitzer, design and decorating books, some monogrammed linen sheets and much more. I am just DONE with some of this and need to get it gone. Check the sidebar to the right to see what’s new on Etsy, and check PigtownDesign on Ebay. I guarantee that there will be lots of great prices on lots of great pieces.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.)

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Want to buy a castle? This one’s for sale. It’s near Aberdeenshire in Scotland.

It needs (quite) a bit of work, but you could do it up in any style you want. All yours for just £400,000! Available through Sotheby’s.