Court Sword (c. 1790): Art, History and Details

Court Sword (c. 1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The hilt of this sword is finely finished with cut or faceted steel burnished to resemble cut stones. The neoclassical urn shape of the pommel was especially fashionable in England after 1780 up to the turn of the century. The upper portion of this blade is blued and gilded to provide a feel of great luxury. By the end of the 1700s, civilians no longer regularly wore swords nor used them as weapons. The court sword (or "small" sword as it was known in England) had become a piece of costume jewelry to be worn only with court dress or by military officers in dress uniform. The hilt and often the upper part of the blade became lavishly decorated as is illustrated by this example.

Object facts

• Title: Court Sword
• Date: c. 1790
• Culture: England, London or Birmingham, late 18th Century
• Type: Arms and Armor
• Technique: steel; silver hilt, polished and faceted; blade partially blued and gilded
• Dimensions: Overall: 99.7 cm (39 1/4 in.); Blade: 82.9 cm (32 5/8 in.); Guard: 8.3 cm (3 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Arms & Armor
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.1095

A detail from the museum

The blue color on the blade was achieved by adding heat to the metal.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of Arms and Armour. [Boston, Massachusetts]: [Frank Gair Macomber], 1900.
• Gilchrist, Helen Ives. A Catalogue of the Collection of Arms & Armor Presented to the Cleveland Museum of Art by Mr. and Mrs. John Long Severance; 1916-1923. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1924.
• Fliegel, Stephen N. Arms and Armor: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Museum, 1998.

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.