The Goldsmith

John "Niello" Purser - Goldsmith

John Purser was born in Sheffield around 1740, the son of a cutler, and came to London at nineteen with a bag of tools and a knack for bonding one metal to another. He started on razors and lancets, moved to hilts for gentlemen's small-swords, and by his thirties had entered his own mark at Goldsmiths' Hall as a working goldsmith. He was never a big man. He was slight, clean-handed and quiet, and clients remarked that he seemed to persuade metal rather than beat it. It was his black inlaid work, sulphide of silver worked into silver so fine that it looked drawn rather than cut, that gave him the name "Niello" among the trade, and later among the colleges.

The colleges made him. Cambridge bursars and fellows bought plate on a scale few private clients could match, and Purser became the man they trusted with cups, salvers and presentation pieces, and increasingly with the small personal commissions of their wealthy connections: snuffboxes, mourning rings, and jewels for wives who wanted their fears looked after. A brooch from his bench might hide a needle-thin blade, and a chatelaine might carry more than scissors. He never advertised this, and never needed to. By the 1790s he was rich, admired, and always fitted with a new pair of gloves for his hands, which had begun to shake.

The rumours followed him into retirement in Cambridge. It was said that no jewel in the county was quite what it appeared, because Purser could copy any stone-set piece so exactly that a family in debt could sell the real diamonds and wear his facsimiles through a season without anyone knowing. It was said he had copied a college's treasure too, and that one of the two pieces in the buttery is not what it claims to be. No hallmark was ever proved false, which was itself part of the whispering, since counterfeiting one was a hanging matter. He died of the mercury he had breathed at the gilding-furnace for forty years, and the Firewrights say he never really stopped working.

Every ghost is hand-made and unique - yours will be similar to the image shown but will vary in intensity and amount of streaking or other markings making it just as beautiful, but different.