The Hardwicke Soup Tureen and Cover

A silver soup tureen and cover, hallmarked in London for the assay year 1737-38 with the sponsor's mark of Paul de Lamerie, the most famous and now one of the most forged names in English silver. It is engraved with matching armorial devices under barons' coronets, and the Portland Art Museum, which bought it in 1969, catalogues it as the Hardwicke Soup Tureen.

The name is not decorative. Twelve months earlier, in the assay year 1736-37, the same silversmith's shop supplied Philip Yorke, Baron Hardwicke, later Lord Chancellor and 1st Earl of Hardwicke, with a ewer that is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum catalogued in four words: London 1736, duty dodger. Its marks were cut from a smaller, already-taxed piece and soldered into the larger one to escape the silver duty, a fraud the museum only brought within the law by striking a fresh, legal hallmark on it in 1944. One patron, one workshop, two objects a year apart: one a documented fraud, the other apparently secure. This record sets out exactly what does and does not establish that difference, and where the evidence for this tureen runs out.

Paul de Lamerie's mark is, in 2024, the specific subject of a Goldsmiths' Company seminar on modern forgery, and a serious twentieth-century collector, Arthur Gilbert, is on record buying a de Lamerie that turned out to be fake. Against that backdrop, a piece with agreeing, unremarked marks and an unbroken institutional record since 1969 is not a small thing to be able to say.

What the tureen is

A soup tureen and cover in sterling silver, 25.4 by 34.9 by 26.8 centimetres, made to stand on an eighteenth-century dining table and hold a single hot dish, most likely the thick meat or game stew that English tables of this class served under French-influenced menus in the 1730s. Its own weight is not given in any source consulted for this record, an absence this record states rather than estimates.

It is catalogued as a pair of parts, a body and a cover, both carrying the same armorial device beneath a baron's coronet. A matching pair of coronets and arms on both elements of a tureen is the ordinary eighteenth-century practice for a piece that would be seen from above with the cover on as often as with it off, and it is also, incidentally, a built-in check: if the two elements ever separate, a mismatch between the arms on the body and the arms on the cover is one of the first things a cataloguer looks for when establishing that a lid truly belongs to its pot.

Baron Hardwicke, one patron, two silversmith's bills

Philip Yorke was born on 1 December 1690 and rose from a solicitor's office to the top of English law faster than almost anyone of his generation: Solicitor-General in 1720, Attorney-General in 1724, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1733, the same year he was created Baron Hardwicke, and Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1737 to 1756, the longest unbroken tenure of that office of the century. He was not created Earl of Hardwicke until 1754. That fact matters directly to this object, because it means that in 1737-38, when this tureen was assayed, and in 1736-37, when a related piece for the same man was assayed, Yorke held only the barony. Armorial devices under a baron's coronet on a piece of the mid-1730s are therefore consistent with his actual rank at the time, not an error and not an anachronism smuggled in later.

He had married Margaret Cocks in 1719; her mother was sister to the earlier Lord Chancellor Somers, a connection that did his career no harm. The Yorke arms impaling those of Cocks are the pairing recorded on the other Hardwicke object connected to Paul de Lamerie's workshop, described below. This record has not independently read the blazon on the Portland tureen and does not assert that its arms are that same impalement; it records what the museum's own catalogue description states, which is armorial devices under baron's coronets, and no more.

The other Hardwicke object is a proven fraud

A year before this tureen was assayed, in the London assay year 1736-37, Paul de Lamerie's shop supplied Philip Yorke, by then Baron Hardwicke, with a helmet-shaped ewer applied with his arms impaling those of his wife Margaret Cocks. It survives, and it is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, museum number M.16-1954. The museum's own catalogue line for it, as recorded on its published gallery trail through the de Lamerie holdings, reads: London 1736, duty dodger, marked 1944.

A duty dodger is a specific and well-documented eighteenth-century fraud. Between 1720 and 1758 a tax of sixpence per troy ounce was charged on new silver brought to Goldsmiths' Hall for assay, and one standard evasion was to cut the punched marks out of a small object that had already paid the duty and solder that marked fragment into the base of a larger, unassayed piece, so that the larger piece appeared to have been tested and taxed when it had not. On the Hardwicke ewer, that is what happened: marks legitimately struck on a smaller, cheaper object were transposed onto the larger ewer to make it appear correctly assayed. The fraud remained illegal indefinitely under English law, which is why the Victoria and Albert Museum did not simply display the ewer as found. In 1944 it had the object brought within the law by striking a current, legal hallmark on it, a remedy the legislation still provides today. The catalogue line records both facts side by side, the original crime and its later correction, rather than hiding either.

The two objects were made in the same shop, under the same sponsor's punch, for the same patron, within about a year of each other. That proximity is what makes the pairing useful rather than anecdotal: it shows that a genuine PL punch on an object commissioned by a real, named, historically documented patron is not by itself proof that the object is what it claims to be. The mark tells a buyer who took legal responsibility for the assay. It does not, on its own, tell a buyer that an assay actually happened correctly on that object.

What secures this tureen, and what this record has not verified

A London hallmark of this date is built from four punches, and each does a distinct legal job: a lion passant certifying the sterling standard of the alloy; a leopard's head crowned certifying that the piece was assayed at Goldsmiths' Hall in London; a date letter recording the assay year; and a sponsor's mark identifying who submitted the piece and answered for it. On a piece attributed to Paul de Lamerie after 1732, that fourth punch should read PL, the sterling-standard mark he registered on 27 March 1732, distinct from the earlier two-letter LA mark he used on Britannia-standard silver before that date. Nothing in the Portland Art Museum's public description of this tureen, so far as this record was able to establish it, flags any disagreement among its punches, any transposition, any let-in patch, or any correction comparable to the 1944 hallmark on the Hardwicke ewer.

That is a meaningful absence, not proof of innocence. The Goldsmiths' Company's own guidance on detecting a transposed or forged mark asks whether the punches sit where this particular form of object was normally marked, whether there is excess solder around them suggesting a soldered-in patch, and whether the impression shows correctly on the metal's reverse; none of that physical examination has been carried out for this record, which has worked from the museum's public catalogue description and a single photograph and not from the object itself. This record has also not independently confirmed the exact blazon of the arms against a peerage or heraldic reference, has not seen the tureen's weight published anywhere, and has not located any conservation, technical-imaging or Goldsmiths' Company examination record for it. Those are the honest limits of what can be said here, and they are recorded as limits rather than smoothed into a stronger claim than the evidence supports.

Lamerie's mark under pressure, then and now

The duty dodger was a tax fraud, not an attempt to fool a buyer about who made an object, and de Lamerie's own shop was not innocent of the practice: the Hardwicke ewer is only one documented case among several the Goldsmiths' Company minutes and later cataloguing have connected to his workshop. The market problem this record is built around is a different and larger one: the deliberate forging of his mark itself, to sell a later or lesser piece of silver as his work.

That problem is current, not historical. On 12 April 2024 the Goldsmiths' Company held a seminar at Goldsmiths' Hall titled Marks of Deception: Tackling Fakes and Forgeries in Antique British Silver, and its own published announcement states plainly that there has been a recent increase in attempts to forge the maker's mark of Paul de Lamerie. Peter Cameron, a member of the Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee, spoke specifically on the fake marks of Paul de Lamerie; Timothy Schroder, Alastair Dickenson, Will Evans and Eleni Bide also spoke. The Company's own published account of the day names the increase in forgeries but does not publish a count of pieces detected, and no such count appears to be public anywhere consulted for this record.

The body that rules on such cases, the Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee, formerly the Antique Plate Committee, has operated since 1939. It is worth being exact about what it does: it advises whether an article's marks comply with current hallmarking law, based on the object's hallmark, the panel's own expertise and scientific testing where needed, and if it finds marks forged, counterfeit or transposed, they are cancelled. It does not certify that a given hand made a given object. A clearance from that committee means the marks are lawful. It is not, and does not claim to be, a certificate of authorship.

The financial stakes of getting this wrong are not abstract. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's own published history of the Gilbert Collection records that the collector Arthur Gilbert, who began buying silver by de Lamerie and by Paul Storr in the mid-1960s, was, in the museum's own words, quick to realize the potential for errors in judgment after a purported de Lamerie acquisition turned out to be a fake, and that the experience was what drove him to study the field seriously rather than trust dealers alone. A wealthy, motivated, increasingly expert collector bought a fake Lamerie. That is on the institutional record of one of the collections that now anchors the Victoria and Albert Museum's own silver galleries, and it is the clearest single demonstration available that the name on this tureen's mark is worth forging.

From a Georgian dining table to a purchase fund in Oregon

Between the tureen's assay in 1737-38 and its appearance in the Portland Art Museum's collection, nothing is documented in the sources consulted for this record. The museum's own published catalogue record does not name an owner, a dealer, or a sale between the eighteenth century and its acquisition. The tureen was bought by the museum with funds from the William H. Nunn Trust, a fund established in memory of Alice B. Nunn, and given the accession number 69.45a-c, placing the purchase in or around 1969. No purchase price is published in the sources consulted. The object is not currently on view.

That is a real and stated gap of roughly two hundred and thirty years, and this record does not attempt to bridge it with a plausible-sounding guess. A reader who wants the chain of ownership between a Georgian baron's table and a Pacific Northwest museum's storage will not find it here, because it has not been found anywhere this record consulted.

Reading a Lamerie object honestly

Put together, the case for this tureen is this: a form and material consistent with the mid-1730s output of a documented London workshop; a sponsor's mark consistent with the punch that shop registered in 1732; a rank of coronet consistent with its presumed patron's actual title at the date of manufacture; and an institutional custody record, however incomplete before 1969, with no flag of correction, re-marking or dispute attached to it anywhere this record has found. None of that is a laboratory certificate. It is the ordinary, honest standard of evidence that most silver of this class ever receives, set deliberately against an object from the same workshop and the same patron's household that failed a stricter test and had to be legally repaired in the twentieth century, and against a documented case of a real collector buying a real fake bearing this exact name.

A record that called this tureen definitively genuine on that basis would be overclaiming. A record that treated it as suspect because the maker's mark is now a known target for forgers would be punishing an object for a crime committed against its own reputation by other hands, on other pieces, mostly much later. This record does neither. It states what agrees, states what has not been checked, and leaves the rest open.