Description:
One of three silver tablespoons (HD 69.0274-69.0274B) with a upturned rounded-end handle with a short mid-rib, and elliptical bowl with a long rounded drop, which is marked "Henchman" in a rectangle for Daniel Henchman (1730-1775), and engraved with an unidentified crest of a griffin's head erased on the back of the handle. Kane lists other tablespoons from the same set in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Winterhtur Museum. The dealer, Gebelein Silversmiths of Boston, noted that these spoons had belonged earlier to Miss Ellen Crosby Roosevelt (1868-1954) of Hyde Park NY, who was the cousin of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and had a sister in Massachusetts. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Henchman apprenticed with silversmith Jacob Hurd (1702/3-1758) of Boston, married his daughter Elizabeth Hurd (b.1730) in 1753 (making him the brother-in-law of silversmiths Nathaniel and Benjamin Hurd), and worked in Boston from about 1750-1775. Henchman was an active goldsmith who served both the residents of Boston and individuals living elsewhere in New England; more than seventy pieces of his holloware and flatware are known to survive. Henchman was a good, and apparently an aggressive, craftsman. During January of 1773 he inserted an advertisement in the "Boston Evening Post" making uncomplimentary references to “those strangers among us who import and sell English plate.” He further said that he would make plate “equal in goodness and cheaper than they can import from London.” This throws an interesting light on the competition existing between English and colonial craftsmen of the day. Whether or not this was unfair is difficult to say, but there is little doubt that it put native workmen on their mettle and increased to no small degree their standards and their work. Certainly the best early American silver could compete with the fineness and quality of continental European workmanship.
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