MARK OF JOHN SAMUEL HUNT, LONDON, 1849

Details

A VICTORIAN SILVER-GILT FIVE-PIECE TEA AND COFFEE SERVICE**
MARK OF JOHN SAMUEL HUNT, LONDON, 1849
Comprising: a kettle-on-stand, teapot, coffee pot, sugar bowl, and cream jug; each realistically formed as a shell, the handle and feet formed as coral and the finial as a shell, the kettle, teapot, and coffee pot with ivory insulators, each with a chased crest, each marked on base; teapot, coffee pot, and kettle marked on cover, finial, nut, and handle, stamped Hunt & Roskell, Late Storr Mortimer & Hunt and with pattern numbers 4421 through 4423
Kettle 16¼ in. (41.3 cm.) high; 243 oz. (7,870 gr.) gross weight

Provenance

Sir Martin Wilson, Bt., Sotheby's, London, 23 February, 1967, lot 85

Literature

J. Culme, Nineteenth-Century Silver, London, 1977, p. 158.
A. Phillips and J. Sloane, Antiquity Revisited: English and French Silver-Gilt, London, 1997, p. 90, no. 23.

Exhibited

New York, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1989
New York, Christie's, Antiquity Revisited: English and French Silver-Gilt from the Collection of Audrey Love, September 1997
San Marino, Huntington Art Gallery, November 1998 - January 1999

Special notice

Notice Regarding the Sale of Material from Endangered Species. Prospective purchasers are advised that several countries prohibit the importation of property containing materials from endangered species, including but not limited to coral, ivory and tortoiseshell. Accordingly, prospective purchasers should familiarize themselves with relevant customs regulations prior to bidding if they intend to import this lot into another country.

Lot Essay

Traditionally the design for this tea and coffee service has been attributed to Edward Hodges Baily, Hunt & Roskell's best known designer, but other artists, including Frank Howard, George Hayter, Alfred Brown, and Henry Hugh Armistead, are known to have made important models for the firm in the same period.

The designer may have consciously drawn upon Georgian pieces in the "marine rococo" style, such as Nicholas Sprimont's famous salt cellars of 1742 in the Royal Collection which were probably cast from real crustacea and seashells. Hunt & Roskell exhibited pieces in the same pattern as the present tea service two years later at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The coffee pot and sugar bowl are illustrated in a review of Hunt & Roskell's exhibit, published in The Expositor of February 15, 1851 and illustrated in John Culme, Nineteenth Century Silver, London, 1977, p. 159.

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