Ewer

Raised from sheet silver and gilded. Raising is one piece of metal hammered up into a hollow form over a stake, annealed soft again every few courses and worked back down; the ewer has no seam because there was never a second piece to join to it. What the chaser then did was push the pattern up from inside and sharpen it from outside, so the ornament is displaced metal rather than applied metal.

The maker’s mark is Symon Owen’s and the date letter puts the finished piece in 1610–11, on the museum’s reading of the marks. That is the year the catalogue prints, and it is the assay year rather than the year the design was drawn — a form like this one was current for a working lifetime, and a hallmark dates a visit to the assay office, not an invention.

Gilding is the last thing that happens and the first thing a photograph gets wrong. A gilt surface returns the studio to the camera, so the plate is lit from well behind the piece and the highlights are left where they fell. Polishing them out in the file would take the chasing with them, which is the part of the object worth looking at.