A Silver Goblet by Gilbert Marks,

the bowl cylindrical on spreading spiral fluted trumpet-shaped foot, the knopped stem with
three foliage supports, the bowl chased with flowers and foliage, with an
overall hammered finish,

hall-marked near rim, further engraved 'Gilbert Marks '97'

London, 1897.

Exhibited

 The Fine Art Society, 1899

In 1899, an exhibition of Gilbert Marks’ work was held at the Fine Art Society. It is possible
that this goblet was exhibited during the exhibition, as a piece described as ‘Cup with Poppy Design,’ was
listed in the catalogue. The eminent art critic M. H Spielmann, wrote in his foreword to the catalogue, that Marks
was “gifted with a dainty imagination, with pure feeling for form and line and to harmonise all, with a love of
simplicity of beautiful objects.” Marks is considered as the finest art silversmith to have worked in the
Arts and Crafts tradition, rejecting theindustrial processes of manufacture, which had sacrificed the quality
of art and design for quantity and convenience.

Marks’ dislike of the soulless and monotonous nature of industrialised life, and its detrimental
impact on the arts, is something he shared with John Keats and the Romantic poets. It is in fact
possible to link more than just Mark’s artistic motivation to Keats and the Romantics. In his foreword,
Spielmann noted the‘sleep-inducing poppies’ that Marks had chosen to use. It is not fanciful to imagine
that Keat’s famous poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ influenced Marks to make this piece, in particular,
the following stanza:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: