Tablespoon

Date1785-1786

Maker Thomas Northcote

MediumSilver (Sterling)

DimensionsOL: 8 1/2"; OW (bowl): 1 3/4"

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1971-399

DescriptionSilver tablespoon with oval bowl, double drop, and turned-back, rounded handle with beaded border and crest engraved on the face.
Label Text"Old English" spoons with downturned handles and oval to egg-shaped bowls first appeared about 1760 or shortly thereafter. By the early 1770s they had largely displaced those of "Hanoverian" type. Their handles are often enhanced with various decorative borders, such as stamped beading, as in this example, or chased feather-edging and bright-cut engraving, as in CWF accessions 1971-398 and 1971-397. Featheredging was the first of these decorative treatments to be employed. An early feather-edged spoon of 1766/67 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Charles Harris, the Charleston silversmith, in an early American reference to such spoons, advertised in the South Carolina Gazette for August 1, 1768, that he "Makes and sells all sorts of new fashioned. . . tablespoons, feathered on the handle." Angular shoulders flanking the base of the handle, when encountered on "Old English" spoons, appear only on featheredged examples, though they are a regular feature of later spoons of fiddle and king's patterns. This spoon and the two examples noted above are marked toward the ends of their handles, as was customary after 1780.

InscribedOwner's crest of a falcon on two branches engraved on face of handle.
MarkingsMaker's mark "TN" in relief within a rectangle; leopard's head crowned; lion passant; date letter "k"; intaglio monarch's head facing left.
ProvenanceVendor: Garrard & Co. Ltd., London