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Lot Essay
The Worshipful Company of Leathersellers, a City of London Livery Company, was formed to regulate the leather trades in London and its environs and granted its Royal Charter in 1444.
The true identity of Edward Bedle and his association with the Leathersellers Company appears complex.
Records in the custody of the Leathersellers' have yielded information about an Edward Bidle or Biddle (sic.). The son of Edward Biddle, of Nelson, Leicester, he was bound apprentice to a John Barlow on 6th August 1660 and made a Freeman of the Company on 15th October 1667. As apprentices were usually indentured at around age 14, this suggests a birthdate of circa 1646.
Parish records show that an Edward Beadle married a Dorothea Bottomles on the 5th May 1647 at St. Dunstan's Church, Stepney. An Edward Beadle was christened on the 5th October 1651 (the year inscribed on the present lot) at St. Botolph Without Aldgate. Although a posset-pot would have been an appropriate christening gift, any link between this child and the Company is speculative.
See L. Lipski and Michael Archer, Dated English Delftware (London, 1984), for the only other two recorded dated delft vessels bearing the arms of the Leathersellers' Company, both of which are polychrome; the caudle-cup inscribed E W (or F W?) 1660 perhaps for Francis Warner, Alderman and Master Leatherseller, formerly in the Hyde Collection and sold at Sotheby's, now once again in the possession of the Company (p. 165, no. 742); and a caudle-cup in the British Museum, painted with a ship, the inscription 'Bee Merry and Wise', the initial D and II and the date 1660 (p. 165, no. 743). For a goblet dated 1655, almost certainly decorated by the same hand as the present lot, see John C. Austin, British Delft at Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, 1994), no. 81. While there are many stylistic similarities between the decoration, the style of the calligraphy and the iconography of that example and the present lot, the most striking parallels lie in the similarity of the 5 with a circular loop at the top; the A with an indented cross-bar and the R with an extended sweep. See also Geoffrey Eliot Howard, Early English Drug Jars (London, 1931), pp. 43-45 and pl. XIX, no.68 (for the first caudle-cup inscribed FW 1660) and see pp. 11-12 for a disussion of the 'man smoking pipe' decoration and its supposed derivation from the grotesques of Italian maiolica.
We are most grateful to Miss Wendy Hawke, Archivist of the Leathersellers' Company, for her assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.
The true identity of Edward Bedle and his association with the Leathersellers Company appears complex.
Records in the custody of the Leathersellers' have yielded information about an Edward Bidle or Biddle (sic.). The son of Edward Biddle, of Nelson, Leicester, he was bound apprentice to a John Barlow on 6th August 1660 and made a Freeman of the Company on 15th October 1667. As apprentices were usually indentured at around age 14, this suggests a birthdate of circa 1646.
Parish records show that an Edward Beadle married a Dorothea Bottomles on the 5th May 1647 at St. Dunstan's Church, Stepney. An Edward Beadle was christened on the 5th October 1651 (the year inscribed on the present lot) at St. Botolph Without Aldgate. Although a posset-pot would have been an appropriate christening gift, any link between this child and the Company is speculative.
See L. Lipski and Michael Archer, Dated English Delftware (London, 1984), for the only other two recorded dated delft vessels bearing the arms of the Leathersellers' Company, both of which are polychrome; the caudle-cup inscribed E W (or F W?) 1660 perhaps for Francis Warner, Alderman and Master Leatherseller, formerly in the Hyde Collection and sold at Sotheby's, now once again in the possession of the Company (p. 165, no. 742); and a caudle-cup in the British Museum, painted with a ship, the inscription 'Bee Merry and Wise', the initial D and II and the date 1660 (p. 165, no. 743). For a goblet dated 1655, almost certainly decorated by the same hand as the present lot, see John C. Austin, British Delft at Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, 1994), no. 81. While there are many stylistic similarities between the decoration, the style of the calligraphy and the iconography of that example and the present lot, the most striking parallels lie in the similarity of the 5 with a circular loop at the top; the A with an indented cross-bar and the R with an extended sweep. See also Geoffrey Eliot Howard, Early English Drug Jars (London, 1931), pp. 43-45 and pl. XIX, no.68 (for the first caudle-cup inscribed FW 1660) and see pp. 11-12 for a disussion of the 'man smoking pipe' decoration and its supposed derivation from the grotesques of Italian maiolica.
We are most grateful to Miss Wendy Hawke, Archivist of the Leathersellers' Company, for her assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.