A JAMES II SILVER-GILT BEAKER

The engraved foliage and boar hunt on this beaker is similar to the engraving found on pieces by a maker only known by the initials of his maker's mark, FSs. His body of autograph works comprises approximately twenty small scale pieces such as cups on stands, cordial pots and toilet service items. Most are struck with his maker's mark only, suggesting he could not submit his work to the Goldsmiths' Company, probably because he was a foreigner without a registered mark.

Christopher Hartop in British and Irish Silver in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge Mass., 2007, pp. 77-80, suggests FSs was possibly a French goldsmith, as some makers from towns such as Saumur or Sedan incorporated the initial letter of the town in their punch, below their initial. However, the workmanship and the style of FSs' pieces is more Dutch or German in style. He suggested that the stylised continuous foliage inhabited by animals and figures, as found on the present beaker, and the cherubs and grotesques on other works, resemble the work of the French engraver Henri Le Roy (1579-1631) and that of Etienne-Joseph Daudet who published Nouveaux Livre d'ornemens Propre pour Peintre Graveur Orphevres et autres in Lyon in 1689, as popularised by the workshop of the famous Gribelin family. In this instance the foliage is more freely engraved and the figures of the mounted huntsman, the hound and the boars are more dominant in the composition, which recalls the hunt scenes of the Florentine Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630).

Boar Hunt, after Antonio Tempesta, 16th century. © Alamy Stock Photo