Growing up this treasure sat on the sideboard in my Meme's dining room. I remember standing there, enchanted, looking at all of it's little details and gently lifting the handles or turning the key and opening the top. I thought it was absolutely beautiful.
My mom says that she bought it on a whim at an antiques store in either Covington or Atlanta when she redid her dining room in the 1990s. Mom says she doubts she found out much about it before buying it but that she just liked it. Which is fair. Who among us finds out the history of something before making an impulse purchase at an antique store? Research is for after the fact.
HISTORY
It's called a Georgian knife box, even though it was used to store all the silver and I can't for the life of me find out why. There is surprisingly little information about it online because it was a fad. So shout out to Alexandria Parker who's Master's thesis¹ I read one afternoon while watching Say Yes to the Dress Atlanta.
Knife boxes were popular during the late 1700s and early 1800s for wealthy families to show off all their impressive silver. It absolutely had to be gorgeous, you can't display your silver in some ratty old thing and expect to feel elite now can you?² As a result knife boxes were typically made out of mahogany with a sunburst detail inlaid on the inside of the lid, to be shown off while opened in "display mode" also featuring a "serpentine front" which is what the curvy front is called.
After it fell out of style, the previous next generation who inherited these were also searching for a way to make the family pieces they were passed their own. By this point in the mid 1800s, the long lasting and flat laying silver box had come into fashion and showed no sign of leaving. So the popular trend of the time was to convert your mom's old knife box into a cool and hip stationary box. It makes sense really, with their smooth angled top and interior compartments they look a lot like other stationary boxes of the time.
Mine is not made of mahogany but was instead fancied up with lacquer and papier mâché a trend brought over from Japan by way of Europe.
Due to the large amount of silver these wealthy families had, knife boxes were made and sold as pairs. This added to the conspicuous nature because not only did you have enough money for TWO fancy boxes but also had enough silver to fill them both AND a large enough dining room to hold a large sideboard that they wouldn't look cramped. The pair would sit on either end of the sideboard to frame anything else that was being garishly displayed there.
Now here is where the story of my knife box gets interesting.
I have found one of the best ways to figure out the vocabulary that goes with the treasures you know nothing about is to browse sellers' listings. This way you get a better idea about what you should Google for more info. So, I ended up going through a price guide for antiques from an Australian company called Cater's³ because that is how a girl in her twenties casually fills her time. That was when I stumbled upon a listing for the Exact Same Knife Box! The details all match up, down to the placement of the decorative papier mâché birds. After some additional research, I found out my knife box's match was sold at auction⁴ in Sydney, Australia on May 20, 2012.
I can't properly express how much I want to know the journey that both of these boxes took to start as a pair and end up with one being sold at an antiques store in 1990s Georgia and the other being sold at auction in 2010s Australia.
We are surrounded everyday by treasures that have a deep intricate history that we can only hope to catch a glimpse of. Every time we buy something from an antique store or estate sale or auction we know, at best, the most recent chapter of its story with the possibility of finding out its origins, but there is so much in the middle that we will never know and can only imagine. Which is okay, it would be less interesting to go through life knowing everything that each treasure we come across has gone through. Moving onward all we can do write down what we know and hope that there is enough of a trail for the next generation after us to follow and do what they will with.
-- Catherine
¹ you can also read that here
² I say this ignoring the laundry basket of silver serving pieces wrapped in old dry cleaner bags sitting in the closet
³ who to the best of my knowledge does not make children's clothes
⁴ Unfortunately I could not bring myself to pay for a subscription to an Australian Antiques Reporter website so I do not know how much it was sold for
So cool! I saw you comment on the knife boxes post on Weird Secondhand Finds!
Great story!!!!