A GEORGE II SILVER COFFEE POT, PHILLIPS GARDEN, LONDON, 1752

Viscount Clifden, sold

American Art Association, New York, April 27, 1895, lot 254, bought by

Henry Walters (1848-1931), to his widow

Sadie Green Jones Walters (Mrs. Henry Walters), d. 1943, sold in her sale

Parke Bernet, New York, November 30-December 4, 1943, lot 876

J.J. Klejman Gallery, New York, by 1960

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, deaccessioned

Christie's, London, June 3, 2014, lot 350

E.M. Alcorn, English Silver In The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, vol. 2, 2000, p. 177

This coffee-pot illustrates the connection between the silversmiths Phillips Garden and Paul de Lamerie. It has been suggested that Garden purchased the tools and models from de Lamerie’s workshop when he died in 1751 (Alcorn, op. cit.). Just three years before his death, de Lamerie made a coffee pot with a short spout, cast with coffee leaves and blossoms upon a matted ground above a shell (George Sidney, Beverly Hills, California; Christie’s, New York, May 24, 1977, lot 231). The spout of the present lot by Garden and marked for 1752 is identical to the de Lamerie example of 1748, substantiating the belief that Garden was working from de Lamerie’s models.

This piece is an early example of the American taste for antique Georgian silver. It appeared at auction in New York on April 27, 1895, with the American Art Association, New York. The provenance was given as "Viscount Clifden", probably Henry George Agar, 4th Viscount Clifden of Gowran, who had just died in March at the age of 31, at 7 Carlton Gardens in London. It was purchased by Baltimore-born collector Henry Walters. Henry had collected contemporary painting and Asian art with his father William, but by the early 1890s started being more attracted to antique pieces. This accelerated after his father's death in November 1894, just five months before this piece appeared at auction.

As general manager of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad, Henry had divided his time between Baltimore with his father, and Wilmington NC where the line's main office was located. There he lived in a ménage à trois with a charismatic Southern couple, the Pembroke Joneses. With Henry now president of the railroad, in 1896 the trio moved to New York and performed one of the of most successful social climbs of the Gilded Age, being invited to Mrs. Astor's ball - and therefore members of "the 400" - by January 1901. They lived an extravagant life in New York, Newport, and at Airlie, the Jones estate outside Wilmington, plus regular European trips on Henry's 224-foot yacht.

Pembroke Jones died in 1919 and in 1922 Henry Walters married his widow, Sadie; they had been living together for almost 40 years. On Henry's death in 1931 he left the art in his Baltimore house and in the adjacent Gallery to that city, but Sadie inherited the rest of his collections. The quality of these fantastic pieces was overshadowed by its dispersal after the Depression and in the middle of a World War. A two-volume Parke Bernet auction in 1941 emptied their New York house at 5 E 61st St.; that this coffee pot was offered in the 1943 sale after Sadie's death suggests it was used in Newport, at Sherwood on Bellevue Avenue, or at Airlie, where the gardens Mrs. Walters created are now open to the public.