"This exhibition challenges the reasons why sculpture is usually considered alone, in the gallery, and the decorative arts are considered as part of a period setting. It suggests that by breaking away from these conventional categories we can see how sculpture is also part of a spatial conversation, and how furniture and fittings can be appreciated as unique works." "With five original essays and forty complete catalogue entries, this publication both documents an exhibition and goes beyond it, opening our eyes to the fluidity of formal language in the 'long' eighteenth century, and to the ways in which objects can change according to whether they are seen together or apart, as mobile or fixed, as two- or three-dimensional, as ideal or as functional." --Book Jacket.

First Published in 2005. Silver is unique among the decorative arts in that its raw material is both inherently valuable and infinitely reusable. Its ownership has been a social bench-mark and its form has exercised the skills of sculptors, designers, chasers and engravers, but ultimately it could be, and normally was, melted down and refashioned quite without sentiment. Because of this constant recycling, the survival of any individual object is quite random and unrelated to its uniqueness or otherwise in its period. Hitherto plate historians have focused on individual objects almost to the exclusion of the context - social or economic - from which they came but now that context is seen as crucial in understanding historic plate. So in the first section of this book each chapter considers contemporary attitudes and usage.