posted 03-13-2005 06:44 PM            

The Gilbert Collection is astonishing in its richness and quality - and how lucky England is to have benefited from Sir Arthur Gilbert's mercurial personality (the collection was to have gone to the LA County Museum, but something went wrong and it ended up in Gilbert's home town). Of course, the problem with the Gilbert collection is the fairly thin interpretive framework of the display. On the other hand, the V&A's glorious silver galleries, which are packed with British silver, arranged both chronologically from 1500-to the present, and also subdivided into many smaller thematic displays, are loaded with information from may points of view. I'd guess that it is the most user-friendly and lay-person friendly gallery of silver in all of Europe.

Even more wonderful are the British Galleries at the V&A, in which the silver is dispersed and placed in the context of the overall material culture (furniture, textiles, paintings, ceramics, glass, jewelry) of each successive period in English history. These are the best galleries of their kind in Europe as well. And the V&A collections have masterworks of English silver every bit as great at what's in the Gilbert collection, tho' not as densely amassed.