Treasures on display at Fashion Museum

The latest display at Bath & North East Somerset Council’s Fashion Museum includes twenty pairs of beautifully decorated gloves from the Gloves’ Collection Trust, all intricately embroidered in a variety of materials from tiny seed pearls to sparkling metal thread. The current display also includes five pieces of silver ware of comparable date, and of a similar high quality, which have been generously lent to the Museum by the Holburne Museum of Art.

The display includes two rare early seventeenth-century English pieces - a bell salt, one of only five known examples and a wine goblet. Pre 1640s English silver is extremely rare because so much was melted during the civil war to turn into coinage.

Also on show are three pieces of highly decorated German silver. German silver - made chiefly in the cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg - was highly prized and exported throughout Europe.

Rosemary Harden, Manager of the Council-run Museum commented: “The idea is that these exquisite treasures will give visitors an idea of the richness and opulence of the 17th century, reinforcing the impression given by the embroidered gloves. There are also similarities in the use of design motifs between the silver and the gloves, for example a similar treatment of a sea creature, as in the dolphin in the silver and the whale on the gloves.”

“It is great that these two museums in Bath have such exquisite collections of such high quality, and its good to be able to work in partnership to display such fantastic historic treasures for our visitors.”

Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of Decorative Art at the Holburne Museum writes: “This is a rare opportunity to see a juxtaposition of some of the most glamorous luxury goods of the seventeenth century. Most of the people who owned such magnificent gloves would have also owned splendid pieces of silver and vice versa. It's a window into seventeenth-century taste.”

For more information on the Gloves exhibition and the Fashion Museum, log onto Fashionmuseum.co.uk The Museum is open daily, 11.00-17.00, exit 18.00.