Ath 1767, 12 Knives, Solid Silver, Jean Louis Philippront

Splendid and extremely rare set of twelve Louis XV dessert knives with the hallmark of the town of Ath, the hallmark of the year 1767 and the hallmark of master silversmith Jean Louis Philippront. They have solid silver blades soldered to hollow handles in chased and engraved cast silver of a quality rarely found in eighteenth-century silversmithing. Jean Louis Philippront is undoubtedly the most important Ath silversmith of the second half of the eighteenth century. Unlike most of his colleagues who struggle to survive thanks to the manufacture of "minutiae" (shoe buckles and small boxes and snuff boxes), JLPhilippront produces sumptuous silverwork of very high quality. He began his career in 1752 and worked until the mid-1780s. His works in the Louis XV style are very successful. But it was when he began to create objects in the Louis XVI style that he demonstrated true virtuosity and sometimes even a touch of humor, since one day I discovered a coffee pot made by him where he had made the spout in the shape of an immense tubular brick chimney, as there were everywhere in Hainaut at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The extremely rare dessert knives that I am presenting to you today clearly demonstrate this virtuosity of the goldsmith in its finesse of execution and the abundance of this shell decoration and the superb pommels of the handles decorated with acanthus foliage with a pearl in the center. Such a luxuriant decoration is exceptional on an eighteenth-century knife because 99% of the production of Belgian cutlery in the eighteenth century was made up of plain and smooth cutlery. In addition, cutlery and dessert knives are twenty times rarer than large cutlery. This set is therefore a real rarity in several respects. The weight of silver (938%) in this set is close to a kilo.