An American Silver Teapot, Paul Revere II, Boston, 1791

Mrs. Hannah Rowe (1725-1805), to her great niece

Hannah Rowe Linzee Amory (1775-1845)

Francis S. Parker, Cambridge, Massachusetts (by descent)

Beth Carver Wees, Early American Silver in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013, p. 232

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, loaned 1941, 1942, 1967, 1970

Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1980s–2014

This teapot appears in Revere’s ledgers of January 20, 1791. It was ordered by Hannah Speakman Rowe (1725–1805), who in 1743 had married the English-born merchant John Rowe (1715–1787). John Rowe was a resident in Boston by 1742, when he purchased land and a warehouse from Governor Jonathan Belcher. By 1748, the couple was wealthy enough to commission portraits from Robert Feke, who is considered America's first important native-born artist. In 1764, Rowe developed the area still known as Rowe’s Wharf, where he sold English dry good and imports from the West Indies, including enslaved peoples.

“His allegiances during the fraught years leading up to the Revolution were divided. As a Boston selectman he was an early champion of nonimportation, but he also contracted to supply British troops quartered in Boston. Rowe owned one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party [the Eleanor], yet he remained in Boston after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775 rather than fleeing with other loyalists.” (Beth Carver Wees, Early American Silver in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 231). He managed to successfully survive the war years, and on his death in 1787 he left a wealthy widow.

The sixty-year-old Mrs. Rowe commissioned a group of pieces in the latest neoclassical style from Revere, whose ledgers document these sales: this teapot and sugar dish on January 20, 1791, and on April 20, 1791 a substantial tea urn, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (ibid., no. 87, pp. 230–232). All the pieces were engraved with her initials HR. On her death, the childless widow bequeathed her “Silver Urn, coffee pot, tea pot, sugar bowl, silver castors, four silver salt cellars and spoons” to her great-niece and namesake, Hannah Rowe Linzee Amory (1775–1845).