Art Nouveau Orivit WMF Silver Horse Champagne Cooler

Highly sought after by collectors.

Orivit of Cologne, Germany (1898-1905)

Amongst other manufacturers of art nouveau objects for everyday use the German company Orivit of Cologne, founded in 1895, stands out. No other firm produced as many lovely designs in so short a time. The company was founded in 1895 by Ferdinand Hobert Schmitz who had purchased a pre-existing bronze and metal work firm near Cologne, Germany. In 1898 the word Orivit was listed as a trademark referring to a new luxury pewter line and Orivit items won acclaim garnering a gold medal at the Paris World Exposition of 1900. In 1900 the name of Schmitz's firm was changed to Orivit. The firm employed the revolutionary Huber press which evidently allowed metal to be pressed into the desired form using a highly pressurized system.

Both Hermann Gradl and Georges Charles Coudray are known to have designed pieces for Orivit. Theo Blum, Georg Graseggar, Walter Scherf, Vicor Heinrich Seifert, and Johann Christian Kroner are also known to have been associated with the company.

Orivit products were produced for domestic trade in Germany and sold abroad. In England Orivit was sold by the famous firm Liberty and objects marked "made in Germany" likely made their way into customers' hands in this way. (see FCR article by Paul Carter Robinson)

Like the art nouveau movement itself the company as it originally existed was shortlived; bankrupt in 1905 the firm was purchased by the larger WMF which continues to produce silver plated objects today. WMF continued to produce objects with the Orivit label perhaps treating the company as a subsidiary or using the "brand" on objects of its own manufacture. Direction of the company fell to Georg Friedrich Schmitt (text in German) in 1906. Schmitt brought many designs from the Orion company (which he previously ran) and the same or similar objects may occasionally be found with either mark.

Oddly, after Orivit was taken over in 1905 by WMF, a company well known for its own art nouveau/ jugendstil design, items produced often retained some superficial reference to nature (for instance models 2708, 2713) but lost the grace for which the original Orivit company is still recognized. This disjunction between incorporation of the sinuous line into the entire object and an increasingly simplified reference to natural objects is evident even to the casual observer when reviewing the Orivit items when arranged chronologically/ nurmerically.Evidently the last item number to appear in the Orivit catalogue of 1904, and therefore probably one of the last to have been designed within the original workshops, was model number 2662. This may help to explain the abrupt change in style noticeable when reviewing items arranged by production number before and after the WMF takeover, presumably due to changes in the design staff. To my eye the later pieces which are not of pre-1905 Orivit or Orion design are rarely as attractive as those designed before. However, many of the original Orivit items appear to have been produced for several years after the WMF takeover, in some cases as late as 1925.