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(b Quebec, Qué., Aug 10, 1764; d Quebec, Qué., June 3, 1839).

Canadian metalworker. He studied at the Petit Seminaire du Québec from 1778 to 1780 and began his apprenticeship c. 1780 in the silversmith’s shop of his elder brother, Jean-Nicolas Amiot (1750–1821); the tradition that he was apprenticed to François Ranvoyzé is unfounded. In 1782 he travelled to Paris to complete his training and remained there for five years, supported by his family. He absorbed the Louis XVI style, then popular in France, and after his return to Quebec in 1787 he set up a workshop to introduce this into Canada.

Much of Amiot’s work was for the Church, reworking traditional forms in the Louis XVI style. In a sanctuary lamp of 1788 for the church at Repentigny he elongated the standard shape and decorated it with a balanced arrangement of Neo-classical designs. After 1800 his work became formulaic and less innovative, though there are such notable exceptions as the chalice (...

(b Bordeaux, Nov 4, 1761; d Paris, Dec 10, 1822).

French medallist, engraver and illustrator. He was first apprenticed to the medallist André Lavau (d 1808) and then attended the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture in Bordeaux. In 1786 he travelled to Paris and entered the workshop of Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux. His first great success was a large, realistic and highly detailed medal representing the Fall of the Bastille (1789); because it would have been difficult and risky to strike, he produced it in the form of single-sided lead impressions or clichés, coloured to resemble bronze. The following year he used this novel technique again, to produce an equally successful companion piece illustrating the Arrival of Louis XVI in Paris. Andrieu lay low during the latter part of the French Revolution, engraving vignettes and illustrating an edition of Virgil by Firmin Didot (1764–1836). He reappeared in 1800, with medals of the Passage of the Great St Bernard...

Italian family of gunsmiths, active in the village of Bargi (near Bologna) from the mid-17th century, when Sebastiano Aqua Fresca was making guns, until 1809, when Pietro Antonio Aqua Fresca died. The most prominent member of the family was Matteo Aqua Fresca (1651–1738), a superb steel-chiseller and engraver who specialized in gun locks but also made steel snuff-boxes....

(b Parish of St Martin’s in the Field, Middx; fl c. 1710–1750; d 1759).

English goldsmith. He was the son of Peter Archambo, a Huguenot refugee who worked in London as a staymaker. In 1710 he was apprenticed to the goldsmith Jacob Margas (c. 1685–after 1730) and, like Margas, became a freeman of the Butchers’ Company (rather than the Goldsmiths’ Company) on 7 December 1720. He first registered his mark at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, in 1721, when he gave his address as the Golden Cup in Green Street. One of his apprentices was Thomas Heming. He produced fine quality domestic silver, and a wide range of objects, including cups, candlesticks, cream jugs and cake baskets, bearing his mark survives. His work is French in influence, and he is often credited with helping to introduce the Rococo style into England. His approach to the Rococo was, however, more restrained than that of some of his contemporaries, for example Paul de Lamerie. His work also often incorporates marine motifs. His most important patron was ...

French family of gold- and silversmiths. Robert-Joseph Auguste (b 1723; d ?1805) became a master in 1757 after an apprenticeship that included work for Louis XV. His repertoire was unusual in that it embraced both silver tableware and gold objects of vertu; the latter includes four gold boxes made between 1762 and 1763, and 1769 and 1771 (Paris, Louvre; New York, Met.; London, V&A; Althorp House, Northants). In 1775 he received payment for the royal crown and other regalia (destr.) made for the coronation of Louis XVI in 1774. The majority of his work in silver is tableware and includes partial or complete services for the courts of Denmark (Copenhagen, Kon. Saml.) and Russia (St Petersburg, Hermitage) and for Gustav Filip Creutz of Sweden (1775–6; Stockholm, Kun. Slottet). He also made a service for George III of England (1776–85; Paris, Louvre). Auguste’s style is characterized by a light and graceful Neo-classicism, in which festoons and figures of children as handles or finials are prominent....

(b Uttoxeter, 1682; bur; ?Derby, Oct 31, 1752).

English metalworker . He was the son of Sampson Bakewell, a blacksmith, and c. 1696 was apprenticed in London, possibly to a craftsman associated with the metalworker and designer Jean Tijou. In 1700 Bakewell made railings for a house in St James’s Place, London (in situ), belonging to Thomas Coke, Vice-Chamberlain to Queen Anne and King George I. He subsequently received a second commission from Coke for a garden arbour at Melbourne Hall, Coke’s country house in Derbyshire (in situ); Bakewell opened his forge in a house opposite the hall in 1707. The arbour, which is Bakewell’s best-known work, was completed in 1711; the panels of the cupola are filled with delicate scrollwork, with oak and laurel leaves at the front. The decorative elements are quite restrained and representative of the trend towards simplification of design in early 18th-century English ironwork, compared to the heavy, Baroque forms of Tijou’s work. In ...

French family of goldsmiths and bronze-founders. Members of the Ballin family were active in Paris from the 16th century to the 18th. Claude Ballin (i) (b Paris, 3 May 1615; d Paris, 22 May 1678) became a master goldsmith in 1637. He was granted lodgings in the Louvre, Paris, before 1671 and became Orfèvre Ordinaire du Roi. Nicknamed ‘the Great Ballin’, he was one of the most prominent French goldsmiths of the 17th century. He worked extensively for Louis XIV, providing an enormous quantity of silver and silver-gilt objects, including vases, bowls, display stands and incense-burners that formed part of the silver furnishings (destr. 1690) of the château of Versailles. Ballin’s work in the classical style also included ecclesiastical pieces (untraced) for the cathedrals of Paris and Reims that are known from numerous drawings (Berlin, Kstbib. & Mus.; Stockholm, N. Mus.; Beauvais, Archvs Dépt.), and which also feature in some wall-hangings, for example the ...

(b London, bapt Oct 7, 1708; d London, Sept 16, 1794).

English goldsmith. She married John Bateman (c. 1704–60), a gold chainmaker, in 1732. She entered the first of her nine marks in 1761, after her husband’s death, revealing the paucity of her formal education by an inability to sign her name on the goldsmiths’ register. From 1760 to 1790 she presided over a flourishing business at 107 Bunhill Row, London. From c. 1761 to 1774 the majority of silver produced in the Bateman workshop was commissioned by other silversmiths and consequently was often over-stamped. A large and varied output of Bateman-marked domestic silver dating from the late 1770s and the 1780s survives, including flatware (e.g. pierced and engraved fish slice, 1783–4; Colonial Williamsburg, VA), salvers, cruet frames, jugs, salts, tankards and tea and coffee equipage, as well as civic and church plate, for example a communion cup (1786; London, St Paul’s, Covent Garden). Simplicity of design and extensive use of thin-gauge silver (e.g. bread basket, ...

(b Mantua, Sept 23, 1690; d Mantua, Aug 18, 1769).

Italian painter. He was the son of the goldsmith Giovanni Bazzani and trained in the studio of Giovanni Canti (1653–1715). Giuseppe was a refined and cultivated artist (Tellini Perina, 1988) and as a young man profited from the rich collections of art in Mantua, studying the works of Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Romano, 16th-century Venetian painters, especially Paolo Veronese, and Flemish artists, above all Rubens. His earliest works, for example the Assumption (Milan, priv. col., see Caroli, pl. 20), reveal an affinity with contemporary Venetian painters such as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich and Andrea Celesti, but Bazzani rapidly absorbed the influence of Antonio Balestra, Domenico Fetti and most of all Rubens and Veronese. The inspiration of the last two artists is apparent in a number of works that may be dated in the 1720s and early 1730s. These include the Miracles of Pius V, the Conversion of a Heretic...

English family of glassware enamellers. In 1760 William Beilby (1705–65), a goldsmith, moved his family from Durham to Newcastle upon Tyne, where his son Ralph Beilby (1743–1817) worked as a heraldic engraver. In 1755 William Beilby jr (1740–1819) was apprenticed to the Birmingham enameller John Haseldine. He was then employed with his sister Mary Beilby (1749–97) at the Dagnia-Williams glasshouse in Newcastle upon Tyne, where they decorated drinking glasses called ‘light balusters’ or ‘Newcastle’ glasses and decanters. Their early work is thought to have been influenced by the heraldic work of their brother Ralph: the decoration includes the royal coat of arms of George III and the Prince of Wales’s feathers, painted in full heraldic colours on enamel-twist goblets. Their work then became more Rococo in style, displaying rustic scenes, such architectural fantasies as classical buildings and ruins, baskets of fruit, floral subjects, fruiting vines, exotic birds, gardens and landscapes, using only white enamelling. Designs often incorporated standard vine scroll and hop-and-barley motifs. They used white, monochrome or a combination of enamel colours, and some glasses have gilded rims. Their glasses are often signed with only the surname. Before ...

Italian family of gold- and silversmiths. Vincenzo Belli I (b Turin, 1710; d Rome, 1787) settled in Rome in 1740, where he worked with Roman masters on the altar for the chapel of St John the Baptist in S Roque in Lisbon. The works produced for this altar were the most important set of liturgical furnishings made in Rome during the 18th century (e.g. ewer and basin, 1745–50; Lisbon, Mus. S Roque). He created prototypes that influenced the taste of the period, especially in the field of secular silverware, for example a ewer and basin (Rome, Pal. Venezia), a pair of soup tureens, trays and other tableware (priv. col.). These are richly decorated in a Baroque style, though the forms are classical. Under Vincenzo’s leadership the family shop employed c. 20 people, which made it possible to maintain a steady rate of production to satisfy the constant commissions from nobles and churchmen. On Vincenzo’s death the shop was taken over by his son ...

(b Cremona, Oct 26, 1770; d Cremona, 1854).

Italian gem-engraver and medallist. His numerous works, almost all dispersed, are documented in literary sources. His work, executed with meticulous attention to detail, consists primarily of cameo reproductions of paintings on large size stones. His masterpiece is considered to be the Tent of Darius (1828; Cremona, Mus. Civ.), carved in white Brazilian topaz and based on the painting by Charles Le Brun (Versailles, Château). The former work was commissioned by Bartolomeo Turina of Cremona, as were Angelica and Medoro, Wealth Conquered by Cupid, the head of Niobe and Rinaldo and Armida (all Cremona, Mus. Civ.). Beltrami also received sizeable commissions from the Bonaparte family; these include portraits of Napoleon and Josephine and the Myth of Psyche, portrayed on 16 white cornelians (untraced) supplied to him for that purpose by the Empress Josephine. Other commissions were from the Austrian imperial family, among them an onyx cameo of a wreathed bust of ...

(b Lacochère, Orne, April 29, 1764; d Paris, March 26, 1843).

French cabinetmaker and silversmith. The silver and silver-gilt produced in his workshop rivals that of his contemporaries Henri Auguste and Jean Baptiste Claude Odiot. By 1789 Biennais had established himself at 283, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, as a cabinetmaker and tabletier (a dealer in and maker of small objects). After 1797 Biennais, no doubt encouraged by the dissolution of the guild system, expanded his business to include the manufacture of silver. During the Consulate Biennais became Napoleon’s personal silversmith, although he may have provided Napoleon with silver as early as 1798, when it is said that he supplied him with a nécessaire de voyage prior to his Egyptian campaign (1798–1801) and trusted him to pay for it on his return.

Biennais produced large amounts of silver for Napoleon and his family, including, in 1804, the crown and sceptre for his coronation and a number of nécessaires of different types, remarkable for the combination of forms of varying shapes and sizes that are ingeniously accommodated in a restricted space. One (...

[Bühler]

German family of goldsmiths, furniture-makers and engravers. Lorenz Biller (i) (fl c. 1664–85) achieved prominence with works for Emperor Leopold I, for whom he made a centrepiece with a knight on a horse (1680–84; Moscow, Kremlin, Armoury) that was sent to Moscow as an ambassadorial gift. Lorenz Biller (i)’s sons, Johann Ludwig Biller (i) (1656–1732), Albrecht Biller (1663–1720) and Lorenz Biller (ii) (fl c. 1678–1726), supplied silverware of the highest quality to several German courts, especially that of Prussia, for which Albrecht made large wine-coolers and ‘pilgrim’ bottles (1698; Berlin, Schloss Köpenick). The strongly sculptural style of these pieces suggests familiarity with the work of Andreas Schlüter. Albrecht Biller’s abilities as a sculptor are also evident in his reliefs and in seven splendid silver vases he supplied to the court of Hesse-Kassel (c. 1700; Kassel, Hess. Landesmus.). The silver vases ordered by the court usually followed French fashions, yet the form and lavish decoration of these pieces are quite different. A pair of vases by ...

(b c. 1657; d 1729–30).

American goldsmith and silversmith of Dutch origin, based in New York. His most characteristic products are spoons, teapots, beakers and tankards (with coins set in the lids); his pieces are marked with the letters IB in a shield. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a fine silver teapot and a silver seal made for civic use in Marbletown (Ulster County, NY). Jacob’s son Henricus was also a silversmith....

(b Stockholm, bapt Aug 10, 1662; d Paris, 5 or Feb 6, 1727).

Swedish miniature painter, active in England. He was first apprenticed to a goldsmith and jeweller in Stockholm. He became adept at miniature painting in enamel, a method that had been introduced into Sweden by Pierre Signac (d 1684), and he is said to have studied the enamels of Jean Petitot I and Jacques Bordier (1616–84) when he spent three months in Paris in 1682. He arrived in England in 1687 at the invitation of John Sowters, a merchant who had earlier invited the portrait painter Michael Dahl to England. After spending some years in provincial English towns, including Lincoln and Coventry (1693), Boit was appointed Court Enameller to William III. He travelled in Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France, from 1699 to 1703; the most notable product of this period was his large enamel on copper of the Emperor Leopold I and his Family...

Italian family of gold- and silversmiths. Andrea Boucheron (b Turin, c. 1692; d Turin, 1761) was apprenticed in Paris to Thomas Germain. He was called back to Turin by Victor-Amadeus II of Savoy (reg 1720–30), where he opened two workshops and became goldsmith to the court of Charles Emanuel III (reg 1730–73) in 1737. Almost all of his works have been lost; all that remains is the bronze and silver tabernacle of the Sacro Pilone in the church at Vicoforte near Mondovì, produced between 1750 and 1752 in collaboration with François Ladatte. Andrea’s son Giovan Battista Boucheron (b Turin, 1742; d Turin, 1815), after being taught by his father, went to Rome in 1760. There he completed his training by studying sculpture in the Collini brothers’ workshop. He was active in Paris and Rome and from 1763 succeeded his father as court goldsmith. In ...

(b Birmingham, Sept 14, 1728; d Birmingham, Aug 17, 1809).

English manufacturer and engineer. At the age of 17 he entered his father’s silver stamping and piercing business at Snow Hill, Birmingham, which he inherited in 1759. His marriage in 1756 brought a considerable dowry, providing capital for the establishment in 1762 of his factory in Soho, Birmingham, in partnership with John Fothergill (d 1782). Boulton progressed from the production of ‘toys’ in tortoiseshell, stone, glass, enamel and cut steel to that of tableware in Sheffield plate, on which he obtained a monopoly, and later ormolu (e.g. two pairs of candelabra, c. 1770; Brit. Royal Col.; London, V&A) and silver, and enjoyed a reputation for fine craftsmanship. By 1770 his firm, known as Boulton & Fothergill, had nearly 800 employees and had mercantile contacts in virtually every town in Europe. His social, political and trade connections facilitated the establishment of assay offices in Birmingham and Sheffield in 1773...

(b 1761; d 1833).

French gunsmith. He worked in the service of Louis XVI (reg 1774–92) as Directeur-artiste of the Manufacture d’Armes de Versailles and at the Revolution became technical director of the state arms factory. While working as a manager he also made decorated swords and luxury firearms, some for Napoleon (...