Notes

Kurt Jobst was born in 1905 in Ascona, Switzerland, and trained through a classical apprenticeship in gold and silversmithing at the goldsmith academies of Hanau, Nürnberg and Offenbach in Germany, where he also mastered enamelling, engraving, wood carving and wrought iron work. He opened his first workshop in Germany in 1926 and relocated to Johannesburg in 1935 in response to the rise of Nazism, establishing The Jobst Shop, where he worked until his death in 1971. Jobst credited much of his artistic outlook to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, sharing Morris's conviction that the aesthetic standards of fine art belonged in everyday design, and insisting that no true craftsmanship was possible without an intimate understanding of one's material. This philosophy found its clearest expression in his hammer-raised silver, cutlery, tableware and ecclesiastical vessels, finished with a deliberately hand-beaten surface that kept the maker's hand visible in the finished piece rather than polishing it away, its clean, restrained lines setting him apart from the heavier ornamentation fashionable at the time. He also trained both white and black apprentices in his workshop, a notably progressive stance under Apartheid, and undertook commissions for the South African government and prominent public figures. He died in 1971 in a car accident returning from Mbabane, where he had been training young Swazi jewellers. The present tongs, with their crisp, functional form and hand-hammered finish, are a characteristic expression of these Arts and Crafts principles within mid-century South African silver.