Description:
Silver, apple-shaped teapot with the Eliot arms and elephant crest in elaborate rococo surround, and the shoulder and cover engraved with strapwork and floral designs, which is marked "Hurd" in script in an oval on the base for Jacob Hurd (1702/3-1758). Jacob Hurd has long been recognized as one of the leading New England silversmiths of the mid-18th century. The patriarch of a prominent Boston silversmithing family, he produced a wide range of tablewares in the Queen Anne style. During Hurd’s lifetime the taste for tea drinking became popular, and he met the demand for new silver forms with some of the earliest New England teapots known today. The teapot has a history of ownership in the Gale family of Albany, and is thought to have been made for and originally owned by Jared Eliot (1685-1763), a 1706 graduate of Collegiate School (later Yale College) and an important cleric and scientist in Connecticut. The teapot has a raised cover with a finial composed of a cast silver pointed cone over a flattened wooden ball over a cast silver spool and attached to the body by a three-segment hinge; stepped, molded base; cast S-shaped, partly-faceted, short spout; and C-shaped fruitwood handle with a thumbrest. The base of the wooden handle has split sometime in its past.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+54.499 |
