1 10 4 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/60885908ccc4845ba83c85e1ceda6980.jpg 9a9e889c9a23776ddddc2e674a8b6709 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Image copyright Perth Museum and Art Gallery Item Location Perth Museum and Art Gallery Description This photograph shows the shop front of family jewellers A. & G. Cairncross at 6 St. John Street in Perth. Customers passing the premises of this firm in the centre of Perth could view a range of luxury goods through the large window. At the centre of the display, at eye level, were rows of watches, sparkling silver medals, necklaces, pendants, pins and rings. On the shelves above and below these luxuries for wear on the body were standing clocks for displaying on the fireplace, at the centre of the Victorian home. This selection of stock is fairly typical for a late-nineteenth century jewellery firm seeking to appeal to customers seeking gifts for special occasions like weddings. Presenting goods in an ordered way, lined up behind gleaming windows under an elegant sign, sent a message that the producer was knowledgeable, careful and trustworthy. The firm of A. & G. Cairncross was established in 1869 by brothers Alexander and George, and later developed a reputation for the production of high-quality jewellery in Scottish pearls. The Scottish freshwater mussel, Mya Margaritafera, provided the pearls sourced from the river Tay that winds its way through the town of Perth, and further north in the Highlands and Hebrides. The gems were distinguishable for their bumpy and irregular shapes, and for their distinctive earthy hues; colours ranged from creams through to yellows and browns, silvery light-greys through to dusky pinks and lilacs. These unusual shapes and colours were understood as a sign of wild origins. The Scottish pearl became increasingly valued as the natural product of a living landscape and as an antidote to the mass-produced goods that proliferated during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. A. & G. Cairncross thrived during the first decade of the twentieth century, and moved to a larger showroom at number 18 St. John Street around 1913, where the firm (though no longer in family hands) still operates. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A & G. Cairncross Jewellers, ca. 1900 clock maker gold jewellers pearls Perth silver https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/5be759118e2f4db1444666e938b5d8d1.png 36d2ed69eb670a2d480752c62f3549f5 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Description This view of St Giles’ Cathedral by London engravers James Sargant Storer (1771-1853) and Henry Sargant Storer (1796-1837) was published in Views in Edinburgh and its Vicinity, (Volume 2) shortly after the parade of small shops in the foreground were demolished to widen the streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The shops known as Luckenbooths, or ‘locked booths’ were associated with various small-scale trades, particularly the cheaper end of Edinburgh’s jewellery trade. The booths were a fixture in and around Edinburgh’s Parliament Square from at least the seventeenth century. An aerial plan of the cathedral, found in the sketchbook of nineteenth-century antiquarian Daniel Wilson, depicts St Giles’ Close in the years 1806-18, it includes reference to ‘Luckenbooth Street’ to the north and small shops belonging to ‘Green the Watchmaker’ and ‘Gordon McKenzie Jeweller’ situated on the south side of the church from which direction this engraving is taken. Luckenbooth Street was demolished in 1802 but the Parliament Square booths remained until 1817. Excavations on the walls of St Giles in preparation for the building of Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel in 1909, revealed the remains of fireplaces and containers for smelting glass in the old Luckenbooth cellars, suggesting that some may have contained small workshops. Despite their simplicity, Edinburgh’s nineteenth-century Luckenbooths embodied something of the lively buying and selling street culture in the Old Town at a time when luxury trades were migrating to the bridges that joined old Edinburgh with the new retailing centre of Princes Street in James Craig’s New Town. The booths were immortalised in painted depictions and writings, notably in Walter Scott’s, The Heart of Midlothian, in which Scott describes: ‘a huge pile of buildings called Luckenbooths, which for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town (…) the hosiers, the glovers, the hatters, the mercers, the milliners, and all who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed haberdasher’s goods were to be found in the narrow alley’ (Chapter 5). In jewellery too, small goods made to appeal to a passing trade are thought to have been the stock-in trade of Luckenbooth sellers. Scottish love tokens, known from the end of the nineteenth century as ‘Luckenbooth brooches’, are particularly associated with the booths’ small-scale style of retailing. Typically heart-shaped and featuring the symbolic motif of a crown or two entwined hearts, the brooches were made in silver and gold, with more expensive versions incorporating jewels and precious stones. Like the booths themselves they found resonance with a particular strand of nineteenth-century romanticism, legend associates their simple heart-shaped forms with love gifts exchanged between Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. Father and son team, James and Henry Storer, were talented engravers and publishers of specialised works on topography and architecture producing many similar works to this one. James’s other works include, Views in North Britain Illustrative of the Works of Burns (1805) and The Cathedrals of Great Britain (1814–19). The latter was produced in collaboration with his son, and was credited by the architect Augustus Pugin as including the most accurate existing views of the buildings . Image copyright RCAHMS Item Location Historic Environment Scotland Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Engraving of Luckenbooths at St. Giles's Church, 1819 Edinburgh engravers fashionable consumption gold jewellers silver https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/8b104d62540518b24afe462f60f38916.jpg d4a7ba05020cf96010fb1882e13aa7a2 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Description At the peak of the Kildonan Gold Rush in March 1869 over 600 men travelled to the Highland districts of Suisgill and the Kildonan Burns in the hope of making their fortunes. The three men in this hazy photograph, which was probably taken by photographer, Alexander Johnston, from Wick in Caithness, are standing in front of the huts and tents that formed temporary living quarters in the landscape beneath the Sutherland estate hills at Helmsdale. This make-do, shanty town known in Gaelic as Bal an Or (Town of Gold) was home to a transient workforce of hopeful gold prospectors between January and December and 1869. The history of Sutherland gold began when a nugget of gold was found in the River Helmsdale early in the 19th century. Fifty years later, native Kildonan, Robert Nelson Gilchrist, recently returned from his successful gold-mining venture in Australia, was given permission by the duke of Sutherland to survey the river’s burns and tributaries. Gilchrist’s efforts revealed enough gold to trigger a wave of newspaper reports and a short-lived escalation of mining activity. The Kildonan waterways yielded relatively little saleable gold, yet stories of fortunes made in recent gold rushes in Australia and California fuelled the public’s imagination and their enthusiasm for stories of Scottish gold. The activities at Helmsdale were reported widely in Scotland and London most notably in an extensive article published in the Illustrated London News (May 29, 1869). Mining for gold wasn’t a skilled or artisanal activity; on the contrary characteristic of the Scottish gold rush was that it attracted both seasoned miners returned from the fields of California or Australia and hopeful adventurers armed only with a pick and a sieve or rudimentary kitchen equipment. Gold on the Sutherland land was extracted from the banks of the burn through a process of mining and then sifting in the Helmsdale waters, and much of it found its way to jewellers in Inverness and Glasgow who used it to make jewellery favoured for its novelty and its resonance of the Scottish landscape. The Inverness Courier reported that Mr Wilson, jeweller from Inverness, bought £30, 5s 8d worth of gold early in March and a further £193 worth at the end of the month. D.C Rait of Glasgow was another good customer of the Kildonan miners. Who the men in this photograph are isn’t recorded but twenty-two tents and wooden houses were in place at Bal an Or by the height of the rush, so these men could be seasoned miners or hopeful beginners. The imposition of licenses at the end of the month checked the expansion of the settlement and dissuaded those without experience or equipment from persevering with the difficulties of washing gold and combating the hostile weather. Alexander Johnston (1839-1896), son of plumber, whose mother was the daughter of a local cabinetmaker, set-up as a professional photographer in Wick in 1863, later occupying premises in Parliament Square. Johnston specialised in local harbour scenes and was equipped to take photographs in exposed landscapes. Taking a portable camera and mobile darkroom Johnston travelled for four days to capture images of the Kildonan miners. His photographs of Bal an Or were produced as both single and stereoscopic images. Image copyright Tain and District Museum Trust Item Location Tain and District Museum Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gold Mining in Kildonan, Sutherland, 1869 Glasgow gold Highlands Inverness jewellers photographers https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/08d6b2ae308f92a46cad521d32222927.jpg 2983d7157e537f6c8fe5cd9e99f95f02 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Image copyright R. L. Christie Works of Art, Edinburgh Item Location Private Collection Description This is a cross brooch or pendant made from native Scottish gold, sourced in the Highlands during the gold rush of 1869, made and retailed by Glasgow jewellers D. C. Rait & Son. The cross is one of very few pieces which can be traced back to a short-lived but widely-reported gold rush in the county of Sutherland in 1869. An inscription on the back of the cross reads: ‘Scottish Gold, D. C. Rait & Sons’. The cross makes the most of the scarce native materials through its clever design. It was constructed from a number of panels of thin sheet gold soldered together to give the appearance of a solid piece. The cross shape with the ring around the intersection mimics ancient monuments on the Hebridean island of Iona – a popular motif during the Scottish-Celtic revival of the 1860s. Foliate decoration is engraved on the front: leaves grow down and across each panel around a central daisy, creating sparkle and light. Similar designs appeared in fashion magazines advising wealthy middle-class readers that the pendant should be worn suspended from a black velvet ribbon tied at the back of the neck. D. C. Rait & Sons were a respected jewellery firm who operated in Glasgow in one form or another from the 1820s until well into the twentieth century. In 1869, the firm was listed as ‘Goldsmiths to the Queen, Jewellers, Watchmakers and Silversmiths’, and operated from a fancy showroom at 34 Buchanan Street on Glasgow’s main shopping promenade. The goods inside the shop were of such high value that the owners reputedly had the walls and roof lined with iron plates. In March 1869 The Inverness Courier reported that Rait & Sons had ‘been active purchasers of Sutherland gold from the commencement of the discovery, and have assayed several specimens officially’. It noted that ‘these have ranged from 19 to 19¾ carats. Mr Robert Gilchrist, the original discoverer, seems to have been very successful of late at the Kildonan burn, and has supplied Mr Rait with a considerable quantity of gold during the last few weeks.’ This cross shows how the firm used the gold to make fashionable designs that fused ideas of Scottish history with motifs drawn from the natural world, linking the native materials back to the landscapes in which they were sourced. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kildonan Gold Cross, ca.1869 aristocratic patronage Celtic revival design fashionable consumption Glasgow gold jewellers Sutherland