Victorian Silver-Plated Fruit Serving Spoon

"You never see these — I found spoons like these one by one at brocantes, and they are very, very rare," Patricia recalls, and her words say everything about this Victorian silver-plated serving spoon from her personal collection at Chanteduc, the farmhouse in Vaison-la-Romaine she and Walter have called home for decades. The spoon is silver, its handle densely worked in repoussé with scrolling foliage, cartouches and figural ornament running from an elaborately decorated terminal up a tapering shaft divided by fine parallel reeding. The bowl is the real revelation: deeply formed and gilded within, it is embossed with a still life of fruit — as it was made for serving fruit. Patricia gathered these spoons individually, piece by piece, at French brocantes — the open-air antique and secondhand markets she has long frequented. That each one was a separate find makes the collection all the more personal.