How British silver seduced 17th-century imperial Russia

Three hundred and seventy pieces of British-made silver in the State Hermitage Museum range in size and importance from thimbles to a wine cooler large enough to bathe the young Tsarevitch Ivan VI in 1740. This, the Jernegan-Kandler wine cooler, familiar from Elkington’s 1880s electrotype in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Whiteley Silver Galleries, has been justly described as both “the most extraordinary piece of silverwork to be made in England in the 18th century” a