Marion Harry Alexander Spielmann

“ On bowl, beaker, tazza, cup, and dish, we have the pomegranate, the thistle, blackberry, or what not—as unlike the dull monotony of the million-struck fiddle-pattern spoon as Marks himself was unlike the ordinary Birmingham craftsman. It is the principle of undying Greece and Etruria which we find in work such as his—a touch of that art which alone survives from ancient civilizations, and which alone brings those nations face to face with ours—the concrete testimony of ancient glories that otherwise live but in the page of history. ”

“ Marks's career, though brief—for he has died before passing the middle age—was a protest against the ordinary conditions under which the modern silversmith has to work. He insisted that the smith must be at once the designer, the artist, and craftsman. He would have no dies, no machinery, no repetitions; every piece that left his hand was an original, and of no essential part of any piece is there any duplicate. He would have no polishing that would destroy the beauty of the metal's natural colour, no turning that would remove the marks of the tool or injure the modelling. ”

“ The silver-lover who is something more than a worshipper of the hall-mark must recognize the beauty and power that lay in the hammer, the raising tools and tracers of a repoussé worker such as Marks; and appreciate the apparent ease with which he could work the yielding metal, play with his pattern and his ornament, and bring it up to accents of sharpness or caress it into liquid meltingness. ”