Height overall: 18.4cm (7.2in)
Cast and hammered silver. The present bust belongs to a small group made under Georges Weil’s personal supervision in London in the late 1960's. Signed on gold plaque applied to the inside the collar, ‘G.Weil’, and numbered A2 1970. Hallmarked London 1970. Raised on a white marble base. Cased.
Georges Weil was born in Vienna in 1938 and arrived in England on the last plane from Antwerp as a refugee on the eve of the Second World War. He attended St. Martins School of Art in the mid 1950’s where bronze portrait sculptures of political figures featured among his student works. Through the 1960s Weil pursued a successful career in jewellery design, that, by the 1970s, had tapped into the rejection of the traditional forms, in favour of an avant garde style that attracted the patronage of a fashion-conscious ‘jet set’ clientele that included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor. The Churchill centenary in 1974 offered Weil a commercial opportunity to combine his admiration of Churchill, his talent as sculptor and his working knowledge of the jewellery business, to create his range of miniature portrait studies in silver. The Churchill bust and other sculpture formed from gold, silver and precious gems, elicited enthusiastic press reviews including one from the Illustrated London News that went so far as to declare, “Fabergé objets, exquisite as they are, and superb as their workmanship is, are really no more than expensive toys – Weil’s pieces are works of art.”