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Lot Essay
THOMAS JEMPSON
Gerald Taylor first tentatively attributed the mark TI a star below to Thomas Jempson, a specialist in this type of box, see G. Taylor, Proceedings of the Silver Society, 'Some London Platemakers' Marks, 1558-1624', 1984, pp. 97-100. This was confirmed by Dr. Mitchell, op. cit., p. 535-536. He describes the unconventional apprenticeship Jempson received before he was made free of the Goldsmiths' Company by March 1604. The records of the Company list a number or infringements for submitting plate below standard, in one instance a mere pennyweight, one 20th of an ounce, less than the required purity. Jempson worked for the Royal Household and took seven apprentices during his career, living for most of this time in the parish of St. John Zachary, probably in Staining Lane, where he was residing in 1623.
SHELL-FORM SPICE BOXES
In the Tudor and Stuart periods, exotic spices and sugar were expensive imports that required equally precious containers. Only about two dozen silver shell-form boxes dating from the late 1500s to the early 1600s are known to survive. Most contemporary descriptions of scallop-shell boxes describe them as sugar boxes, however some boxes have divided interiors which would suggest that they could have been used for a variety of different condiments, see T. Schroder, British and Continental Gold and Silver in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2009, vol. II, pp. 504-506, fig. 193, and P. Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England, London, 1990, pp. 366-367, fig. 219. Glanville notes that it was usual to sweeten wine with sugar, a practice seen as curious and uniquely English by the Lincolnshire born traveller and commentator Fynes Moryson (1566-1630), 'Gentlemen garrawse onely in wine, which many mixe with sugar - which I never observed in any other place or kingdom'. She further notes the that Spanish Ambassadors at the court of King James I found the practice equally strange on their arrival in 1604.
A virtually identical box by the same maker was sold from the David Little Collection, Christie's, London, 3 December 2019, lot 122; another was sold from the collection of the 5th Earl of Rosebery at Mentmore, Sotheby's House Sale, 18 May 1977, lot 1714. Perhaps the earliest example is one of 1598 in the collection of the Middle Temple, London. A similar sugar box of 1620 was sold at Bonham's, London, 30 June 2010, lot 260. Others also by Thomas Jempson are in the collections of the Huntington Library, Pasadena, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, see Schroder, op. cit., 2009, p. 506 for a list of related boxes.