This previously unrecorded chocolate pot is the fourth known American example of this form. The two most closely related pieces were both made by Edward Winslow, and the third similar one was made by his apprentice, Peter Oliver. (The Winslow examples are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery; the Oliver example is in a private collection, illustratec in Kathryn C. Buhler, Colonial Silversmiths, Masters & Apprentices, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1956, fig. 45.) The Oliver chocolate pot has a spout very close to that on the Webb example, but lacks the cut-card work and gadrooned borders of the other chocolate pots in this group. John Coney made the only other early chocolate pot known, but it is of an unusual ginger-jar form, a shape rare even among English chocolate pots (Michael Clayton, The Collector's Dictionary of the Silver and Gold of Great Britain and North American, 1985, pp. 90-91).

Edward Webb was trained in London and died in Boston on October 21, 1718, apparently at an elderly age. His estate inventory was recorded by silversmiths John Edwards and John Dixwell, who listed numerous silversmithing tools, including "A forging Anvil, a Planishing Test, 2 Tests with plaine and flower'd Spoon Swages, 13 Raising Anvills and other Anvills." The Boston News-Leter of November 17 and 24, 1718, announced that Webb "having no poor friends in England that wanted, and getting his money here, he bequeathed Two Hundred Pounds . . . for the use of the poor of Boston." (Buhler, op.cit., p.28).