Antique Cast Brass Openwork Bird and Scroll Trivet, c. 1900–1940

The Piece

A cast brass trivet, pierced right through, with two stylised birds turning towards each other inside a wreath of scrolling tendrils.

The birds are the whole reason to look at it. Each is drawn as a single flat plane with no modelling at all, a plump breast, a small triangular beak and one incised ring for an eye, and out of each body sweeps a long wing that stops being a wing halfway along and becomes a scroll. They face one another across the centre with their beaks almost touching.

Everything else is spirals. Volutes and C scrolls fill the field between and beneath the birds, curling back on themselves so that the open ground and the metal carry roughly equal weight, which is what stops a pierced design of this density from reading as clutter.

A broad plain rim runs round the outside, flat on top and unornamented, and it does the same job a mount does on a print. Three small peened heads sit flush in that rim where the feet are riveted through from below.

The finish has worn the way old gilded brass does. The raised faces of the birds and the scrolls are rubbed to a warm bright gold where hands and cloths have reached them, while the recesses and the undercuts hold a dark near black deposit, and across parts of the surface the gilding has broken up and the metal beneath has gone granular.

History & Provenance

It is cast in a single piece. The design, the scrollwork and the outer rim are continuous metal with no joins, the edges of the piercing carry the slight taper that a pattern needs to draw from a mould, and the recessed ground has the fine granular texture of a sand cast surface rather than the smoothness of a stamping.

The feet are separate and riveted through the rim. That matters for dating. A later decorative trivet has its feet cast integral with the body because it is cheaper, and separately made feet peened through from below is the older and more laborious way of doing it.

The drawing is Art Nouveau rather than after it. The bird reduced to a flat silhouette, the wing that dissolves into a whiplash scroll, the circular field filled edge to edge and the refusal of any modelling or shading are the vocabulary as it was actually drawn around the turn of the twentieth century, and behind it sits the Celtic revival that fed the same movement. Later foundries quoting the style tend to soften it, add relief and tidy the asymmetry, and none of that has happened here.

The surface supports the same reading. The gilding is worn through to bare metal on every raised face and has broken up rather than simply dulled, and the dark deposit in the undercuts is hard and layered. That is long handling, not storage.

No maker's mark is present on the face. Cast brass trivets are conventionally marked on the reverse rather than the front, so the absence here says only that the front is unmarked. An absence of that kind sets an outer limit rather than a starting point.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A trivet is one of the few decorative objects that still has a job. This one takes a teapot, a casserole or a hot pan off a finished table, and it is heavy enough and flat enough to do it without sliding.

It also works with nothing on it at all, which is the harder test. Pierced metal on a dark wood table reads as a piece of drawing rather than as a utensil, and the open ground means it picks up the colour of whatever it sits on.

The birds do the selling. Two of them, facing, beaks nearly touching, is a quietly affectionate image and people respond to it before they work out what the object is for. It hangs as well as it sits, and on a kitchen wall or a plate rail it holds its own against much larger things.

Warm gold against green stone, dark oak, white plaster or a painted wall is an easy combination, and brass at this scale is the kind of small piece that finishes a shelf rather than crowding it.