# The Hardwicke Soup Tureen and Cover > Paul de Lamerie - 1737-38, the London assay year running from late May 1737 to late May 1738 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/paul-de-lamerie/lamerie-hardwicke-tureen/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-12 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Paul de Lamerie - **Date:** 1737-38, the London assay year running from late May 1737 to late May 1738 - **Medium:** Sterling silver - **Dimensions:** 10 x 13 3/4 x 10 9/16 in. (25.4 x 34.9 x 26.8 cm). Weight not published in the sources consulted. - **Object type:** Silver - **Period:** English rococo, eighteenth century - **Current location:** Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1737-38** Associated by the holding museum's own title and cataloguing with Philip Yorke, Baron Hardwicke (created Earl of Hardwicke in 1754) `[documented]` (origin) Hallmarked in the London assay year 1737-38 with the sterling-standard sponsor's mark of Paul de Lamerie. The Portland Art Museum catalogues the piece as the Hardwicke Soup Tureen and Cover and describes it as engraved with armorial devices below barons' coronets, consistent with Yorke's rank at the date of manufacture: he held the barony from 1733 and was not created Earl of Hardwicke until 1754. This record has not independently read the blazon and relies on the museum's own title and description for the identification. - **-1969** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, dealer or sale is documented between the tureen's assay in 1737-38 and its appearance in the Portland Art Museum's collection around 1969. The gap is recorded rather than bridged. - **1969-present** Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon `[documented]` (acquisition) Museum purchase, accession 69.45a-c, funded by the William H. Nunn Trust Fund, established in memory of Alice B. Nunn. No purchase price is published in the sources consulted. - **2017** Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon `[documented]` (photograph) Photographed on 2 November 2017 by the Wikimedia Commons contributor Daderot while the piece was on exhibit, and released to the public domain. This photograph, verified from the file's own extmetadata (LicenseShortName 'Public domain', Copyrighted flag false), is the lead image of this record. - **present** Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon `[documented]` (storage) The museum's own record states the tureen is not currently on view. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - No auction appearance is documented for this tureen in any source consulted for this record. It is known only through its 1969 museum purchase from the William H. Nunn Trust Fund, for which no price is published. ## Literature - Susan Hare (ed.), 'Paul de Lamerie: At the Sign of the Golden Ball. An Exhibition of the Work of England's Master Silversmith (1688-1751)', Goldsmiths' Company, London, 1990. - Ellenor Alcorn, 'Beyond the Maker's Mark: Paul de Lamerie Silver in the Cahn Collection', with a foreword by Tessa Murdoch, John Adamson, Cambridge, 2006. ## Open questions - Who commissioned the tureen, and was it new plate ordered by Baron Hardwicke himself, a gift, or a later re-engraving of an older piece for him? The Portland Art Museum's public record, as consulted, does not say. - Does the engraved blazon actually match Yorke impaling Cocks, the pairing recorded on the Hardwicke duty-dodger ewer? This record has not independently read the arms and states only what the museum's own catalogue description gives, which is 'armorial devices below barons' coronets.' - What does the tureen weigh? No weight is published in any source consulted for this record, though weight is the single most direct fraud check on a piece of this class and period. - Where was the tureen between its assay in 1737-38 and the Portland Art Museum's purchase around 1969? No owner, dealer or sale is documented in the sources consulted. - What did the museum pay in 1969, and how was the William H. Nunn Trust Fund constituted? The credit line names the fund and gives no figure. - Has the tureen ever been examined by the Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee or its predecessor the Antique Plate Committee, given the documented recent increase in attempts to forge Paul de Lamerie's mark? No such examination is recorded in the sources consulted. - Is the tureen a single commission or part of a larger dinner or dessert service, in the way the Newdigate centrepiece and other de Lamerie table silver of this period often were? Nothing in the sources consulted establishes either answer. ## Sources - [1] Portland Art Museum, online collection record for The Hardwicke Soup Tureen and Cover, maker's mark of Paul de Lamerie, London, 1737-38, sterling silver, accession 69.45a-c, museum purchase from the William H. Nunn Trust Fund established in memory of Alice B. Nunn. Source for the title, hallmark date, dimensions, the armorial devices below barons' coronets, and the note that the work is not currently on view. The museum's own legacy database was intermittently unreachable during research (connection refused); the details used here are corroborated across independent search-index citations of the same page and align with the same record's use as source 17 in the Iconotheca maker page for Paul de Lamerie. - [2] Wikimedia Commons, file and API metadata (extmetadata) for 'File:The Hardwicke Soup Tureen, Paul de Lamerie, London, 1737-1938, silver - Portland Art Museum - Portland, Oregon - DSC08892.jpg', photographed by the contributor Daderot on 2 November 2017. Source for the confirmed public-domain licence (LicenseShortName 'Public domain', Copyrighted flag false) used as this record's lead image, verified directly by API query for this record. - [3] Victoria and Albert Museum, 'A Trail of Paul de Lamerie Silver in the V&A', gallery trail. Source for the Hardwicke duty-dodger ewer, museum number M.16-1954, the arms of Hardwicke impaling Cocks, the London 1736 hallmark, and the museum's own catalogue line 'duty dodger, marked 1944'. - [4] The Goldsmiths' Company, 'Marks of deception: tackling fakes and forgeries in antique British silver', announcement for the seminar held at Goldsmiths' Hall, London, 12 April 2024. Source for the reported recent increase in attempts to forge Paul de Lamerie's maker's mark, Peter Cameron's paper on the subject, the other named speakers, and the history and role of the Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee. - [5] Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 'History of the Gilbert Collection'. Source for the direct quotation that a purported de Lamerie acquisition by the collector Arthur Gilbert turned out to be a fake, and for the collection's later gift and loan to Britain in 1996 and display at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2009. Fetched and quoted directly for this record. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke'. Source for his birth on 1 December 1690, his legal and political career, his creation as Baron Hardwicke in 1733 and as Earl of Hardwicke only in 1754, and his marriage to Margaret Cocks in 1719. TERTIARY. - [7] Iconotheca, maker page for Paul de Lamerie. The house page on the maker, read in full before this record was written, and the source for the biography, the mark registrations of 1713 and 1732, the 1714 to 1726 fines and charges, the 1737 committee episode over the Company's right of search, and the Hardwicke ewer as the explanation Hare gives for de Lamerie's resistance to that clause. - [8] The Goldsmiths' Company Assay Office, 'Antique Silver and the Law: A Guide for the Antiques Trade'. Source, via the Iconotheca maker page which consulted it directly, for the duty of sixpence per ounce charged between 1720 and 1758, the mechanism of a duty-dodger transposition, and the detection criteria used by the Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee. NOT CONSULTED DIRECTLY for this record. - [9] Metropolitan Museum of Art, public Collection API, object record 200583, Tureen, Paul de Lamerie, London, assay year 1736-37, accession 49.7.99a-d, the Jules Bache Collection, 1949, confirmed public domain. Source for the related_works comparandum. Fetched directly for this record. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Paul de Lamerie'. Used only for general corroboration of dates already established by source 7. TERTIARY. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.