Victorian Repoussé Silver Plate Sugar Scuttle on Pedestal Foot, c. 1880–1900

The Piece

A Victorian silver plate sugar scuttle, the little tabletop coal scuttle that held the lump sugar on a well laid tea table, worked in high repoussé over its whole body and raised on a spreading pedestal foot. The bowl is the true scuttle shape: a deep, rounded hod tipped forward on its stem so that the wide lip comes toward the pourer, with a swept, scrolled back rising behind it to carry the handle. The decoration is the full Victorian floral vocabulary. A spray of a cabbage rose, a daisy and leaves sits at the crown of the back, with a run of C-scrolls and acanthus curling down each side; the body below is divided by tall bombe panels with a stippled, matted ground between them, and tulips, ferns and flower sprigs fill the ground; and a second spray of a daisy and scrolling leaf rides the edge of the lip. The handle is a separately cast scroll of acanthus, a leaf curling back on itself at the top and a tight volute at the foot, bolted through the back of the bowl and standing high above it. The foot is a domed pedestal with a band of flowers around the shoulder and a gadrooned, lobed border at the rim.

The exterior has been hand cleaned and the plating reads bright silver, with the darker tarnish left in the recesses of the repoussé to throw the pattern forward; the stippled grounds have softened to a warm pewter tone where the plate has thinned. The interior of the bowl shows its age without disguise. The plate is worn through across the well and the base metal shows as a mottled gray, scratched and pitted from a century of sugar tongs and scoops, and the interior of the foot carries a stamped scrollwork pattern from the sheet it was raised from, with a trace of old blue paint at one side. There is no scoop; it was lost long ago, as they nearly always are. No maker's mark is present on the base.

The scuttle stands straight on its foot, the handle is tight, and the body has no splits, dents or repairs. A few small dings sit in the lip and the stem. It is offered as a decorative piece in honest antique condition, cleaned but not replated.

History & Provenance

The sugar scuttle was a Victorian conceit. When coal was the fuel of every parlor and the brass coal scuttle stood at every hearth, the silver trade made a miniature of it for the tea table: a hod for lump sugar, a tiny shovel for a scoop, and a handle to pass it round. The English firms of Sheffield and Birmingham made them in electroplate from the 1860s, and the American plate makers of Connecticut, Meriden, Rogers, Wilcox and their rivals, took the form up through the 1870s and 1880s and dressed it in the dense, machine-chased floral repoussé that Americans called quadruple plate. A scuttle like this one, with a tall cast handle and a pedestal foot, was the top of the line, meant to sit beside the spoon holder and the pickle castor on a sideboard that was judged by how much silver it carried. The fashion died with the century, and the scuttles that survived were kept as sugar bowls, then as curiosities, and now as the kind of small, sculptural silver that styles a table.

No maker's mark is present and the scuttle is offered as an unattributed Victorian piece, most likely American. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the electroplate over a white base metal, the machine-chased repoussé with stippled grounds, the separately cast and bolted acanthus handle, and the gadrooned pedestal foot are all consistent with manufacture between about 1880 and 1900.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a piece for a tea tray, a bar or a sideboard, where the tipped bowl and the tall scrolled handle give it a presence that no plain sugar bowl has. Filled with sugar cubes and a small silver scoop it does its original work; filled with wrapped sweets, tea bags, matchbooks or a posy of garden flowers it does a new one, and empty it stands as a small piece of Victorian sculpture on a stack of books or a mantel. It belongs with old silver, ironstone and linen in a traditional dining room and gives a shot of ornament to a plainer modern table. For a shop or designer client it is the sculptural, photogenic bit of antique plate that sells on its shape and its roses and fills the Victorian silver niche at a size that ships easily.