Evald Nielsen

Evald Nielsen (June 5,1879 - May 12,1958) was a Danish silversmith and long-standing master of the Goldsmith’s Guild of Copenhagen and one of the leading men behind the organizing of Danish gold- and silversmiths.

Nielsen was born in Stubbekøbing on the island Falster in the southeast of Denmark. In 1887 his father, a coach builder, smashed his knee in a working accident and went bankrupt with his workshop. When the father died in 1893, the family was left in poverty.

In 1893 Evald Nielsen was apprenticed to the workshop of Aug Fleron in Copenhagen, first as a press operator, later as steel engraver. In 1900, when he had finished his training, he travelled and worked in Germany, Switzerland, and France and visited the World Exposition in Paris 1900.

In 1905 Evald Nielsen opened his own shop and workshop in a cellar in Raadhusstræde, Copenhagen. At first he worked as silversmith as well as engraver, but after a few years he concentrated on silver, producing and selling hollow ware, jewelry and cutlery. In 1914 his workshop employed 14 persons.

In 1918 his shop and workshop moved to Vester Voldgade 11 in Copenhagen, where the firm had its base for the following decade. In 1930 the workshop was moved from Vester Voldgade to rented premises in Ny Vestergade 7 some hundred meters east of Nygade.

From 1927 and a decade onwards Evald Nielsen’s oldest son, the silversmith Aage Weimar (1902–1986) worked in the firm, until he opened his own workshop.

Evald Nielsen’s other son, Bjarne Weimar (1906–1988), finished his education as a chaser in 1929 and started working in his father’s firm. In 1941 he was taken into partnership, and he tried to carry on with the firm, when Evald Nielsen died in 1958. His attempt wasn’t successful, and the shop in Nygade closed in the spring of 1970.

Evald Nielsen opened his workshop the year after the well known Georg Jensen started as a silversmith. In the years to come Evald Nielsen put his mark on the Danish skønvirke-style (jugend).

Contrary to Georg Jensen, Evald Nielsen based his firm on his own design and only to a small extent used artists and architects as designers.

During the first decades he himself designed jewelry, hollow ware and cutlery. He generated his own style, among other things characterized by the so-called drawn out or stretched mountings holding the stones of the jewelry.

Throughout his whole life Evald Nielsen was characterized by his wholehearted holding on to skillful craftsmanship and excellent quality. To him the fully trained craftsman was the one and only to design and create. “The professional skill and knowledge of the trade has always been essential in preserving the confidence between the goldsmith and the costumers,” he wrote in Guldsmede-Bladet (trade paper for the Danish gold- and silversmiths).

Because of that he worked hard to organize the training of the employees at the workshops, and among other things he in 1918 took part in planning and teaching at the first courses for gold- and silversmiths at the Danish Technological Institute.