William Cripps

English, free 1738–d. 1766

ActiveLondon, United Kingdom

BiographyWilliam Cripps (1715-1766), a manufacturing and retail silversmith who rose to prominence in London’s West End during the 1740s and 1740s, was trained in the workshops of David Willaume (1658-1741), a successful goldsmith and banker. Of the latter’s other apprentices the names of the following are familiar to collectors of 18thCentury English silver: his son, the younger David Willaume (1693-1761); Lewis Mettayer (d. 1740), Paul Tanqueray, Charles Hatfield (c. 1739/40), Aymé Vedeau (c. 1780/81), William Kidney (1702?-1756), and Thomas Pitts (whose Air Street, Piccadilly, workshops were acquired by the young Paul Storr in 1793).
Cripps gains his freedom in 1738 and entered his first mark as a largeworker on 31 August 1743 from his premises at the sign of the Crown and Golden Ball, Compton Street, Soho. His second mark was entered on 16 July 1746 upon moving to the Golden Ball, ‘on the terrace’ in St. James’s Street, where he continued the Willaumes’s business until his death on 1 January 1766:

‘Yesterday Evening died at his House in St. James’s-Street of a Fit of Apoplexy, Mr Crips [sic] a Gold and Silver-Smith of great Business. He was suddenly seized after Supper on Tuesday Night, and continued in great Agonies til he expired.’ (The Public Advertiser, London, 2 January, 1766, p. 2c)

‘On Thursday last the Surgeons opened the Head of the late Mr. Cripps, Goldsmith and Jeweller of St. James’s-Street, who died on Wednesday Evening; and we hear his sudden death was occasioned by the bursting of a Vein in his Head.’ (The Public Advertiser, London, 4 January 1766, p. 2c)

It appears from his will, proved on 6 January 1766, that Cripps had neither wife nor children and that his business was continued by George Coyte (a friend of the artist Thomas Gainsborough), retail silversmith, to be succeeded by Mark Cripps, who seems to have been a near contemporary relation of William, perhaps a cousin.

‘As might be expected from his training under Willaume,’ writes Arthur Grimwade, Cripps ‘became an accomplished craftsman and a versatile exponent of the rococo style; to judge from his surviving pieces he enjoyed a considerable clientele.’

- http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/arts-of-europe-2/lot.401.html

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