Tea Caddy

A small silver-gilt tea caddy, hallmarked in London for the assay year 1741-42 with the credit of Paul de Lamerie, held at the Cleveland Museum of Art as the Thomas S. Grasselli Memorial Collection. The museum accessions it in three parts: a cover record for the whole object, 1943.179, and separate numbers for the canister body, 1943.179.a, and the lid, 1943.179.b. It is a single caddy, not a pair and not a set with a matching sugar box, and it is a distinct object from the Hardwicke Soup Tureen and Cover already in this archive, a different form, a different institution and a different accession made under the same maker's mark six years apart.

Nothing is engraved on it. No arms, crest, motto or initials survive on either the canister or the lid, which is unusual for surviving Lamerie table silver of this class and means the object carries none of the heraldic evidence that dates or authenticates most of his documented output. Its own dating rests entirely on a hallmark the museum has not published punch by punch, set against a Victoria and Albert Museum tea caddy from the same workshop that carries no mark at all and is dated only by style and by the arms it does bear. Between the two objects sits the whole evidentiary problem this maker's silver poses in miniature.

Before 1943 nothing is known. The Cleveland Museum of Art's own provenance record gives only a name and a terminal date for the piece's ownership before it entered the collection: Mrs. Thomas S. Grasselli, to 1943. No patron, dealer or sale from the 1740s to the mid-twentieth century is documented anywhere consulted for this record, a gap of roughly two hundred years that this record states rather than bridges.

What the caddy is

A single silver-gilt tea canister with a separate, hinged or lift-off lid, 13.4 by 9.6 by 5.8 centimetres, small enough to sit inside a fitted case on a tea table rather than to stand on it alone. The Cleveland Museum of Art's own description places it in the ordinary function of the form: a lockable container built to hold an expensive, taxed commodity and to display, in the process, the status of the household that owned it.

Its ornament is the museum's own reason for dating it to the maker's mature period. The curving body has, in the museum's words, sloping shoulders on which the scrolling lines and swirling naturalistic ornament on all four sides echo the caddy's own silhouette, a design the museum credits to Paul de Lamerie in the early 1730s and states became a standard form for tea caddies by the end of that decade. This object, hallmarked roughly a decade after that innovation, is squarely inside the period in which the shape it uses had already become the trade's normal answer to the problem of how to make a tea caddy look expensive.

A silver object with nothing written on it

Every other Lamerie object already in this archive carries an engraved clue to a first owner. The Hardwicke Soup Tureen at the Portland Art Museum has armorial devices under barons' coronets, unread in detail but present. The Newdigate Centrepiece at the Victoria and Albert Museum carries the arms of Newdigate impaling Conyers, tied to a documented 1743 marriage. A pair of tea caddies and a sugar box made for Sir James Dashwood around 1738, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, carry cartouches understood to reference the tea plant and sugar cane, a commission tied to a named couple.

This caddy carries none of that. The Cleveland Museum of Art's own catalogue data lists no inscriptions on either the canister or the lid: no arms, no crest, no motto, no initials. That is not a small gap. On English silver of this period the engraved armorial is frequently the earliest surviving evidence of ownership, read years or centuries before any document turns up, and it is the check a cataloguer runs first when trying to connect an object to a family. This caddy offers no such check. Whoever first owned it left no mark on the metal that says so, and if the museum's own record is complete, none ever existed.

Dated by a punch this record has not read

The museum gives the object's date as 1741-42, a two-year span rather than a single year. On London silver that precision is itself informative: a London date letter changes at the end of May, so any object dated to a specific assay year has been read against a specific hallmark cycle, not merely assigned a plausible decade by eye. The museum does not publish which of its four expected punches, the sponsor's mark, the lion passant, the leopard's head crowned, and the date letter, were actually read to reach that span, nor does it state their position on the object. This record has not examined the object directly and has not attempted to read the marks from a photograph alone, and it says so rather than supplying a false precision.

The contrast that makes this worth stating is a second Lamerie tea caddy, unmarked, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, museum number M.314-1962. It carries no hallmark of any kind and is attributed to Lamerie on style, with its engraving credited to William Hogarth working from a design by his master Ellis Gamble. Because it has no marks, the museum can only date it to about 1730, a full decade's latitude. It does, however, carry a coat of arms, Antonio Lopez Suasso impaling Da Costa, which is the evidence this Cleveland caddy lacks. Between the two objects, the workshop's output splits into two incomplete cases: one caddy with a mark precise enough to fix a two-year window and no engraved owner, and one caddy with an engraved owner and no mark at all. Neither is the complete evidentiary package a cataloguer wants, and this record has deliberately paired them rather than pretending either is.

Silver gilt, and what the gilding signalled

Gilding a silver object before the mid-nineteenth century meant fire-gilding: gold powder worked into a mercury amalgam, applied to the cleaned silver surface, and driven off in a furnace so that the mercury vaporised, a process specialist dealers describe as having killed many gilders young, leaving a fused gold film bonded to the base metal. Vermeil of this kind, made by exactly this method, survives from Lamerie's own workshop and from his younger contemporary Paul Storr, and it reads, examined closely, with a warmer, more textured surface than the electrogilding that replaced the technique in the following century.

The choice to gild an entire tea caddy, rather than only its interior, was a choice about expense and display rather than a purely practical one. Tea itself was the more expensive half of the equation: by 1784 the duty on tea imported into Britain stood, as the standard account of English tea equipage records, at 119 percent of its value, a tax so punitive that it was one of the direct causes of large-scale smuggling before Pitt's Commutation Act cut it sharply that same year. A caddy built to hold a taxed luxury at that rate, made of a metal already worth six shillings an ounce before any labour was added, and then gilded on top of that, was not a neutral container. It was, in the museum's own phrasing for objects of this kind, a piece designed to display the social distinction of its owner, and the gilding was part of that display, not an afterthought.

Made to be one of a pair, apparently surviving as one

The standard mid-eighteenth-century English tea service was not a single caddy. Black and green teas were kept separately, in most surviving outfits in two matching silver canisters, packed with a third container for sugar into a lockable wooden or shagreen case built to hold all three. Lamerie's own shop supplied exactly this kind of outfit more than once. A pair of tea caddies inscribed with the motto Nunquam Non Paratus, hallmarked 1731-32 and now in the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, survives as a matched set. The Dashwood caddies and sugar box of about 1738, in their original fitted case, survive as a complete outfit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The unmarked Victoria and Albert Museum caddy discussed above was itself, by the museum's own description, one of a matching pair, its lost companion marked with a different initial for the other kind of tea.

Cleveland's caddy has no such companion in the museum's own record. It is accessioned as a single object in two parts, a canister and a lid, with no sister caddy, no sugar box and no case recorded anywhere in the sources consulted for this record. That does not prove it was always solitary. Cases were built to be opened daily for a century and more, and the parts most likely to survive an outfit's breakup are exactly the plain silver canisters, since a shagreen case rots, a lock fails, and a set can be split across an inheritance or a sale one piece at a time. Whether this caddy was made single or is a survivor of a larger outfit that came apart at an unrecorded date is left here as an open question, not resolved by a guess dressed as a fact.

Tea and coffee wares, the category the fraud literature already names

The Iconotheca's own maker page for Paul de Lamerie, read in full before this record was written, sets out the mechanics of the eighteenth-century duty-dodger fraud in detail: a tax of sixpence an ounce on new silver from 1720, evaded by cutting the marks from a smaller, already-assayed object and soldering them into a larger, unassayed one. That page also records, from the Goldsmiths' Company Assay Office's own guidance to the trade, which forms of object are most often found to carry transposed marks of this kind: cups, tea and coffee wares, casters, bowls, mugs and tankards. Tea and coffee wares are named specifically, not folded into a vague category of hollowware.

This record has found no evidence, one way or the other, that this particular caddy's marks have ever been examined against that criterion. No conservation, technical-imaging or Goldsmiths' Hallmark Authentication Committee record for it turned up in any source consulted, and the museum's own public data does not address the question. That is stated as an absence, not as a suspicion. A small silver-gilt tea caddy is exactly the kind of object the trade's own literature flags as worth checking, and this one has not, so far as this record could establish, been checked in public.

Whose hands, on the ordinary pieces

The Iconotheca's maker page also makes the point that governs every object bearing this sponsor's mark: the range of Lamerie's business ran, in its own words, from making a fork or repairing a coffee pot to toilet services, wine cisterns and centrepieces, and how much of that range he personally designed or executed is not known and probably cannot be recovered from the surviving documents. The objects already in this archive under his name tend toward the grand end of that range, a fourteen-part epergne, a documented duty-dodger ewer, a soup tureen with a Lord Chancellor's arms. A plain, unarmorial tea caddy sits at the other end of it, closer to what a large, successful workshop would have turned out as ordinary stock than to a piece built around a single patron's commission.

That matters for how the mark should be read here specifically. A caddy with no engraved arms and no named patron in the record is, on the evidence available, more likely to have been a stock item sold across a counter than a bespoke commission discussed with a client, and a stock item is exactly the kind of object a large shop was most likely to have a subordinate hand finish. Nothing in the sources consulted names who in Lamerie's workshop might have raised or chased this specific caddy, and this record does not guess at one.

Mrs. Grasselli, and the fortune behind the gift

The credit line names the collection, not a person: The Thomas S. Grasselli Memorial Collection. Thomas Saxton Grasselli was president of the Grasselli Chemical Company, a Cleveland firm his father Caesar Augustin Grasselli had built from a sulfuric-acid works founded in Cincinnati in 1839 into a diversified chemical manufacturer supplying acids, fertilisers, zinc products and, during the First World War, explosives. Thomas succeeded his father as president in 1916 and led the company through its 1928 consolidation into Du Pont, becoming a Du Pont vice-president and director himself. He died in 1942.

The museum's own provenance record for this caddy names the owner before 1943 as Mrs. Thomas S. Grasselli, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with the notation ?-1943, meaning the museum records only that she owned the piece up to that year and does not state when she acquired it or from whom. A memorial collection credited in her late husband's name and formed the year after his death is consistent with a gift made in his memory, but the museum's public record does not use the word gift, does not use the word purchase, and does not publish a figure. This record states that gap rather than resolving it in either direction.

The two-hundred-year gap

Set beside the other Lamerie objects in this archive, this caddy's documentary record is the thinnest. The Hardwicke tureen has an armorial connecting it, even if unread in detail, to a documented eighteenth-century patron. The Newdigate centrepiece has arms confirmed against a specific 1743 marriage and a named donor, the bride's grandmother. The Dashwood caddies have a named couple and a firm date. This Cleveland caddy has an assay year and, before 1943, a single American owner's surname with no start date attached to it. Between a London workshop in 1741-42 and a house in Shaker Heights, Ohio, sometime before 1943, this record has found nothing: no dealer, no sale, no second owner, no record of how or when the object crossed the Atlantic.

That is a real and stated absence, not a reason to invent a plausible middleman. Two centuries of silver plate of this class routinely changed hands without leaving a trace, particularly plain, unarmorial pieces that carried no family history worth recording in a will or a sale catalogue. This caddy's silence on that point is itself a small piece of evidence about what kind of object it was in its own century: unremarkable enough, undecorated enough, that nobody thought to write down who had it.

On display, and what remains open

The museum's own exhibition history shows the caddy travelling and returning across eight decades: shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Three Centuries of English Silver in the autumn of 1950; in Cleveland's own thirty-fifth anniversary exhibition the following year; at the Baltimore Museum of Art's The Age of Excellence: Rococo and Its Effect in 1959; back at Cleveland for All That Glitters: Great Silver Vessels in Cleveland's Collection over the winter of 1994-95; and reinstalled in the museum's British galleries in June 2020, where it is on view today in gallery 203A. The plate also appears, without further commentary, in the museum's own printed handbooks of 1966, 1969 and 1978, this record having independently checked the 1966 caption and found it consistent with the current online record.

What is still owed to the object is a short, specific list: a published reading of its hallmarks, punch by punch; its weight; a statement of whether the gilding is the original eighteenth-century fire-gilt surface or a later re-gilding; and, if it is recoverable at all, any trace of who owned it before Mrs. Grasselli. None of those four questions is answered by any source consulted for this record, and none is guessed at here.