Tea pot 1051

The production of hollowware flourished during the heyday of Danish design in the 1940s and 1950s, and in many respects it culminated with Henning Koppel’s large, sculptural, Covered Dish designed in 1954. It is an outstanding dish, a masterpiece of perfectly drawn-out form and craftsmanship. A magnificent piece from a great sculptor.

Georg Jensen Silversmithy had created many great serving dishes, but in 1953 Henning Koppel decided to test his strength against the tradition. He had become sure of himself and knew that he was on his way towards creating a completely new Georg Jensen line that broke with everything that had been seen before. Silver had become his mode of expression and threw him into an entirely new and exciting world.

No one knows how long he worked making sketches of his great covered serving dish ‘Number 1026” – how many figure designs, profiles, cross-sections and details he made, but in 1953 he proudly lugged a 65-centimetre long clay model into the managing director Anders Hostrup-Pedersen’s office. Of course the serving dish was entirely without decoration but with a form and a strength that had no equal. A unique sculpture with no practical handles or hand grasps to lift the heavy lid. “It will be impossible to make”, was the first assessment that escaped the lips of the silversmith who had demonstrated a special talent for realizing Koppel’s idiom and who had been chosen to work closely with him. “So make it some other way – but it has to be two joints fitting into each other” was the brusque reply he received.

The final piece did look just like the clay model and had the two joints fitting into each other.

This is not a piece of hollowware you can manage to make after 4 years’ apprenticeship. It takes many years of training to be able to make this masterpiece – and not all silversmiths at Georg Jensen are trained to make the large covered dishes. If you are to be trained in making the large covered dishes many hours of work can be saved, if another experienced silversmith can guide you. It takes an experienced silversmith about 500-550 hours to make the Covered Dish 1026.