Maker’s Mark of Nicholas Clausen

Made in London, 1724

Silver

Weight: 160gr (5.14oz)

Height: 11.5cm (4.5in)

Nicholas Clausen produced pieces of the finest quality – this taper stick is an excellent example – but it appears his output was quite small. Surviving examples of his pieces are today exceedingly rare, though there are a few in the most important museum collections: the Hermitage, the English Royal Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.

Clausen is first recorded in London in the parish of St. Martin in the Fields, when he is listed in the 1707 Naturalisation Act with two witnesses, Godfried Wittich and Sven Holst; the implication is that he was of Swedish rather than German origin. He entered his first mark at the Goldsmith’s Hall in 1709.

The style and quality of the work marked by Clausen is in the tradition of another immigrant group, the Huguenot silversmiths, who were French Protestant refugees. These people began to come to England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, when Louis XIV removed the considerable tolerance they had been given during the previous eighty-seven years. They developed a heavier style of silver making, with cast rather than wrought work, which was more expensive than most of the English production of the seventeenth century. English society in this period was rapidly becoming richer, as it recovered from the civil war and revolutions of the seventeenth century. It was beginning to increase its empire (at the expense of the French) and was greatly expanding its trade. For the aristocracy and the rich merchant class of London the new style was both affordable and popular.

Clausen’s most spectacular surviving piece is the Russian imperial throne in the State Hermitage, St Petersburg. This was reported in The Gentleman’s Magazine 31 July 1732:

’a magnificent Silver Chair of State, adorn'd with an Imperial Crown, and a Spread Eagle, etc., gilt with Gold, made here for the Throne of the Empress of Russia, was finish'd this month. The Work cost near as much as the Metal, which weigh'd 1900 Ounces’.