I’ve been thinking about artists who arrived at the table by accident. Fornasetti came from theatre and illustration (I wrote about him last autumn), the plates were almost a joke that got out of hand. Sottsass was an architect who became too radical for architecture and ended up making objects that misbehaved on purpose, you’ll know if you read that one. Neither of them set out to design things you eat from. Instead the table found them.
I’ve been trying to find the next artist I wanted to focus my attention on but nothing came to mind at first. Then one day, browsing, I discovered the 2025 Silver Set, a collaboration between Rachel Whiteread and Puiforcat which I absolutely loved. I realised then I knew the name, Puiforcat, a heritage French silversmith, but not much beyond that. So I went looking.
Puiforcat, it turned out, was more interesting than the name suggested.
Unlike Fornasetti and Sottsass, his work looks, at first, like exactly what it is. Silver. Cutlery. A teapot. A tureen. And then you look longer, and you realise it isn’t behaving like tableware at all. It’s behaving like sculpture that has agreed, reluctantly, to be useful.
The Puiforcat name had existed since 1820, a family silversmith workshop, respected but conventional. Jean Puiforcat changed that. Born in 1897, he served in World War I, apprenticed after it, and by 1922 had set up on his own within the family house. The work he made in that decade, the 1920s, when he was in his late twenties, still looks so contemporary. Smooth surfaces, geometric forms, and then, out of nowhere, a handle in rosewood. A touch of lapis lazuli. Onyx. Cold silver meeting warm stone. That contrast is everything.
He was obsessed with mathematics, with proportion, with the idea that beauty wasn’t decorative, it was structural. While René Lalique was covering everything in flowers, Jean Puiforcat was doing something quieter, and somehow more radical. In 1937, at the Paris Exposition, an entire pavilion was dedicated to his work. He was, briefly, the most important silversmith in the world.
And then Fascism arrived, and he left. First to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, then Havana, then Mexico City, where he opened a new workshop in 1942 and began making pieces that looked different, looser, more flamboyant, with Mexican motifs woven into the geometry. He died there in 1945, aged 48. The house continued without him, quietly and carefully, until 1993, when it became part of the Hermès group. And this is where it gets interesting.
Because the house today is doing exactly what Jean did, bringing artists in, and letting the work surprise everyone. The Donald Judd collaboration produced a dinner service based on geometric drawings Judd made in 1989, executed in sterling silver with that same quiet radicalism.
And then there’s the 2025 Silver Set, entrusted to British artist Rachel Whiteread, who started, as she always does, with the ordinary. A silver collection of tableware cast from corrugated cardboard, folded, rolled, shaped into everyday objects. The dents, the imperfections, the ring left by a wet glass on a flat surface are all still there. Sterling silver, perfectly made, with the deliberate trace of a human touch.
It’s a very particular kind of hospitality, if you think about it. The idea that what you put on a table should have been thought about as seriously as what you put on a wall. That a fork is worth the same consideration as a painting. Puiforcat believed this.
Thanks for being here as always and stay cosy until next time, Jx
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