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Lot Essay
This dish was hallmarked in the year of the marriage of Sir Francis Prujean and Margaret Fleming, which suggests the dish was a wedding gift, perhaps from a Fleming relation, the two coats-of-arms both commemorating her previous marriage and celebrating her recent wedding. Margaret was later married a third time to Sir John Maynard (1602-1690), a Commissioner of the Great Seal.
Sir Francis Prujean was a celebrated physician whose father had been rector of Boothby in Lincolnshire. Educated first by his father he then attended Caius College Cambridge, graduating as a Medical Doctor in 1625. He established a practice first in Lincolnshire and then London, where he eventually became President of the Royal College of Physicians between 1650 and 1654. He was Knighted by King Charles I in 1661 and attended Queen Catherine while she suffered from typhus fever in 1663.
A pair of similar dishes, also divided into eighteen sections and by the same maker A.F. of 1664 is in the Untermyer Collection, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, illustrated in Y. Hackenbroch, English and other Silver in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, New York, 1969, p.xxi, no.50, where the author notes the Portuguese influence in the design, visible in an number of forms following the arrival of Queen Catherine of Braganza. A dish of sixteen sections by the maker RN, 1665 is in the collection of St. John's College, Cambridge and is illustrated in E.A. Jones, The Old Plate of the Cambridge Colleges, Cambridge, 1910, p.78, pl.LXXXIX.
Sir Francis Prujean was a celebrated physician whose father had been rector of Boothby in Lincolnshire. Educated first by his father he then attended Caius College Cambridge, graduating as a Medical Doctor in 1625. He established a practice first in Lincolnshire and then London, where he eventually became President of the Royal College of Physicians between 1650 and 1654. He was Knighted by King Charles I in 1661 and attended Queen Catherine while she suffered from typhus fever in 1663.
A pair of similar dishes, also divided into eighteen sections and by the same maker A.F. of 1664 is in the Untermyer Collection, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, illustrated in Y. Hackenbroch, English and other Silver in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, New York, 1969, p.xxi, no.50, where the author notes the Portuguese influence in the design, visible in an number of forms following the arrival of Queen Catherine of Braganza. A dish of sixteen sections by the maker RN, 1665 is in the collection of St. John's College, Cambridge and is illustrated in E.A. Jones, The Old Plate of the Cambridge Colleges, Cambridge, 1910, p.78, pl.LXXXIX.