Centerpiece from the Nereid Service (c. 1900): Art, History and Details

Centerpiece from the Nereid Service (c. 1900) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Goldsmith's & Silversmith's Company (British).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Originally thought to have been made by the early 19th-century London silversmith Paul Storr because it had been marked with spurious Storr hallmarks, more recent scholarship has revealed that this service, representing the triumph of Great Britain on the high seas through the allegorical images of Grecian nymphs (nereids), was actually made to display at the 1900 world's fair in Paris. Such nationalistic fervor permeated design at the turn of the 20th century, especially in the years leading up to the First World War, when national pride was brought to its heels in Europe through a devastating conflict.

Object facts

• Title: Centerpiece from the Nereid Service
• Date: c. 1900
• Creator attribution: Goldsmith's & Silversmith's Company (British)
• Culture: England, late 19th-early 20th century
• Type: Silver
• Technique: silver
• Dimensions: Overall: 66.1 x 97.8 cm (26 x 38 1/2 in.); Base: 79.5 x 97.8 cm (31 5/16 x 38 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1943.189

A detail from the museum

This centerpiece is actually the product of many hands since the Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' Company operated as a cooperative of silversmiths who sold their work through the company.

Collection credit

The Thomas S. Grasselli Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Clark, Mark A. Paul Storr Silver in American Collections. 1972.
• The Magazine Antiques 44, no. 4 (October 1943).
• Marcus, Margaret Fairbanks, and Anson Howe Smith. Period Flower Arrangement. New York: M. Barrows, 1952.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.