Describes the methods used to make artistic, literary, documentary, and political forgeries and the recent scientific advances in their detection. Includes over 600 objects from the British Museum and many other major collections, from ancient Babylonia to the present day.

A review of the pottery and porcelain found in Williamsburg, with a summary of the wares and their datable characteristics.

An examination of the development, role, and influence of the British decorative art dealers who invented an Anglo-Gallic style for elite interiors. In this volume Diana Davis demonstrates how London dealers invented a new and visually splendid decorative style that combined the contrasting tastes of two nations. Departing from the conventional narrative that depicts dealers as purveyors of antiquarianism, Davis repositions them as innovators who were key to transforming old art objects from ancien régime France into cherished “antiques” and, equally, as creators of new and modified French-inspired furniture, bronze work, and porcelain. The resulting old, new, and reconfigured objects merged aristocratic French eighteenth-century taste with nineteenth-century British preference, and they were prized by collectors, who displayed them side by side in palatial interiors of the period. The Tastemakers analyzes dealer-made furnishings from the nineteenth-century patron’s perspective and in the context of the interiors for which they were created, contending that early dealers deliberately formulated a new aesthetic with its own objects, language, and value. Davis examines a wide variety of documents to piece together the shadowy world of these dealers, who emerge center stage as a traders, makers, and tastemakers.

This, the first book on the subject for over twenty years, classifies all known authenticated pot-lids by subject, lists their many variations and sizes, assesses their rarity and value and provides much new information on their history and contents. Errors and omissions in the earlier literature, many perpetuated through successive publications, have been corrected and the whole listing has been renumbered to avoid the anomalies caused by the absence of flexibility in the old system. Every lid has been measured so that all size categories can be accurately defined and rarity has been gauged as accurately as possible by an examination of nearly all auction catalogues from 1924 to 2002. For the first time virtually every item is featured in full colour. The section on ware has been simplified and clarified and many previously unrecorded items are published for the first time. The floral sections have been extensively revised and extended. This is the most comprehensive volume ever produced on this subject and should be the standard reference for years to come.