Usually I comment here on other people’s posts. I decided it was only fair that I post and invite everybody else to take their best shot at mine!
So this post covers three points.
- Auctioneers, through lack of checking assignor’s reps, making wrong representations.
- Use of different marks for same silversmiths on the same item in two separate parts
3.The fact that Paul Revere who gets credit for creating a hammered bowl on a stand merely copied something the London silversmiths had already created and sold.
Let’s start with the item itself:
It’s a sugar bowl with a lid made three years later than the bowl by the same smith.
The Auctioneer suggests it was William Parker. Which, for many people who monitor this site, makes no sense as his mark wasn’t registered until 1798 and he wasn’t even born in 1728-31 when this item is date-marked for.
Does it matter? Are auctioneers entitled to crouch behind their clauses which permit them to misinform without consequences? If they were when we could all physically attend the auction and check stuff out but now we have to rely on their photos is it still fair or does the legislation need updating?
In this case the misreps’ work against the auctioneer. Should his assignor have a remedy?
This sugar bowl is made by William Darker or Wiliam Darkeratt whose sterling marks are registered 1726 and 1732. He was a specialist hollowware maker producing tankards, coffee pots, beakers, small jugs, sugar bowls and the occasional salver. He died in 1734.
This bowl was assayed in 1728 and then, three years later, the owner, possibly someone other than the original owner, decided he either had to clean up the spiders dropping bits from his ceiling onto his table and into his sugar bowl or ask William to make him a lid.
He opted for the lid.
In the meantime William had changed his sponsor mark slightly and re-registered a new one:
So the same bowl, same maker, two different date letters and two different sponsor marks.
Happens but not that often.
Now finally, there is this: if it’s a round bowl, even spun and mass produced by Liberty or Tiffany or Birks in the 20th Century it somehow has Mr Revere’s name associated with it.
Paul, colonial history junkies will recall, was the Boston silver merchant who, alongside William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, rode from Boston to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington and the militia in Concord, to move military supplies before the British could seize them back in April 1775.
He did all this according to a myth popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”.
In fact he and his compatriots likely warned the colonial militia saying “The Regulars are coming” or “The Redcoats are coming,” and they will have done so discreetly to avoid arrest, not by shouting in the streets.
So why are the modern sellers of these bowls still pushing this silversmith who strictly speaking was simply a British colonial traitor?
Call it marketing. A Revere bowl? A Darkeratt bowl? Both names are Huguenot French in origin. One sound like something Bram Stoker came up with as a side plot character and the other, the sunny uplands of tea-dumping and pro-slavery in the face of imminent British abolition of the latter. Okay I might be displaying a Canadian colonial bias myself here.
That’s it.Three things about a bowl auction making these points: it’s misrep-ed by the auctioneer to his disadvantage this time. It’s got two different marks on it from the same maker and it’s a UK not a colonial American invention.
In fairness I have told the auctioneer of his error.