Brass and Brassware

Brass has been a popular and versatile metal for many centuries. Its manufacture began in Britain in the sixteenth century and subsequently developed into a major industry. The history of the rise of English brassmaking, together with the role of the specialist craftsmen - founders and braziers, chiefly - who produced most finished brassware, is traced here, with many illustrations of the extraordinarily wide range of uses applied to this metal. As well as covering brassware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a well-established field for collectors, this album emphasises the importance of brass in the Victorian period, when brass was at the peak of its popularity and could be found in almost every walk of life.