Eel dish 1054

The covered dish is truly a piece of art. This masterpiece has many of the qualities of an abstract sculpture. Henning Koppel did indeed himself regard his designs as sculptures: “I believe that any object first and foremost should be beautiful. To make a thing functional and practical is not as difficult as some may want you to believe. It is actually the easiest part”.

Strict reason and rational thinking are behind the sensuality and voluptuousness in Henning Koppel’s designs. At the same time however, the beauty of these shapes is deliberately unpretentious and natural. Similarly, the light reflection in the silver is a soft and muted sheen thanks to the gentle curve.

This is not a piece of hollowware you make after having finished your apprenticeship of 4 years. It takes many more years of training to be able to make this masterpiece – and mostly only 1 or 2 silversmiths in the workshop are capable of making the covered dish. When being trained in making the covered dish many hours of work are saved if another experienced silversmith can guide you and pass on his experience of how the silver reacts.

It takes an experienced silversmith about 500-550 hours to make the covered dish.
Both the dish and the lid are raised from a flat sheet of silver by the same techniques as the Covered Dish 1026 and some of the challenges are the same and demand the same master skills and many hours of patient work with the silver. Silver is a very lively and soft material and a wrong blow with the hammer could create tension where it should not. This will cause some extra hours of work to straighten it out.

For the Covered Dish 1054 the challenge for the silversmith lies in the line where the dish and the lid meet – the lid must be flush with the bottom all the way - from one end to the other and on both sides this joint must be so perfectly smooth that you do not feel the transition when you let the palm of your hands slide from the top of the lid and down the sides to the bottom of the dish. This dish is 71.5 cm long AND the lid must fit perfectly whether you turn it one way or the other.