Tray

An oval silver dish by Paul de Lamerie, London, 1745-6, bearing the third and last of his three registered maker's marks and dating from the year he served as Third Warden of the Goldsmiths' Company, the guild whose own standard his shop's silver was tested against. Two engraved crests on its face, a lion and a shield reading TOUT EST VANITE, belong to a patron this record has not been able to identify.

Cleveland received the dish in 1941 as part of a larger gift from Mrs. Otto Miller that also included silver by Paul Storr and Ebenezer Coker and a portrait by Matthew Harris Jouett. No owner, dealer, or sale is documented for the dish across the roughly two centuries between its manufacture and that gift; this record states that gap plainly rather than inventing a chain to fill it.

Distinct from this project's other two de Lamerie records, which cover a documented fraudulent companion object and the Goldsmiths' Company's modern scholarship on forged marks, nothing in the sources consulted here raises any question about this dish's own authenticity or its history since 1941. Its most substantial open questions are the identity of its original patron and the two centuries the object spent outside any documented record.

What the dish is

An oval silver serving dish, 29.2 by 41.8 centimetres, made in London in 1745-6. Cleveland's own 1942 description, written by curator Helen S. Foote the year after the museum received it, is the most exact account of its form that this record has found: an oval plateau rising to a cinquefoil, or five-lobed, rim, bordered with an edge of molding and gadrooning, with cast acanthus leaves applied intermittently around the border.

Cleveland's current online catalogue calls it a Tray. The 1942 Bulletin, written a year after the museum acquired it, calls it a meat dish. Both are the same object; the title has simply migrated over eighty years of cataloguing, a small but real reminder that an object's name is not fixed even when the object itself has not moved.

Two crests and an unread motto

The face carries two engraved crests, one on either side. One shows a lion. The other carries a motto: TOUT EST VANITE, French for 'all is vanity,' the standard eighteenth-century rendering of the Vulgate's vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas from Ecclesiastes. That the phrase is there, engraved into a piece of dining silver, is a documented fact about the object. Whose choice it was, and what family bore the lion above it, is not: no source consulted here identifies the armorial bearings, and this record has not been able to match the crests to a specific patron or family.

The underside carries two further scratched marks, transcribed by the museum as 'No 4.' and '41 = 0 1/2.' Scratched notations of this kind are a routine feature of English silver of the period, generally understood as a goldsmith's or retailer's working record of weight, given in troy ounces and pennyweights (twenty pennyweights to the ounce). Read that way, '41 = 0 1/2' would put the dish at roughly forty-one troy ounces, a little under 1.3 kilograms, though Cleveland's own catalogue entry does not gloss the notation and this record has not independently confirmed that reading. The 'No 4' is more suggestive: a number scratched under a piece of this kind ordinarily marks its place in a numbered set.

What the marks establish, and to what certainty

English silver of this date carries four marks struck together at assay, and together they are read as close to documentary proof: a town mark (for London, the leopard's head crowned), a standard mark (the lion passant, for sterling), a date letter unique to that assay office's yearly cycle, and the maker's or sponsor's punch. Cleveland's dating of this dish to 1745-6 rests on that date letter, read against the London office's published cycle.

The maker's mark is the third of three that Paul de Lamerie registered across his working life. He entered his first mark in 1712, not long after taking his freedom of the Goldsmiths' Company; a second on 17 March 1732, at the same time he adopted the sign of the Golden Ball on Windmill Street; and a third, the one this dish bears, on 27 June 1739, when he moved his workshop to Gerrard Street, Soho. That third mark was in continuous use for the rest of his life, so it dates this dish to somewhere in the last twelve years of his career, and the London date letter narrows it further, to 1745-6, five to six years before he died.

A dish made the year he became Third Warden

By 1745-6 de Lamerie was no longer simply a supplier submitting work to Goldsmiths' Hall for assay; he was rising through the Hall's own governance. He was made Liveryman of the Company in 1717 and an Assistant of its Court in 1731. He became Fourth Warden in 1743, Third Warden in 1746, and Second Warden in 1747; only his declining health, in the account given by the sources consulted, kept him from the top position of Prime Warden before his death. This dish's date letter places its assay in the very year, 1746, in which he held the office of Third Warden, one of the officers responsible for the standard his own workshop's silver was tested against.

This is a different thread from the Company's documented trouble with de Lamerie's mark, already covered at length in this project's record for the Hardwicke tureen, where an object bearing his 1732 sterling mark was shown to be a fraudulent reassembly, and where the Goldsmiths' Company's own modern scholarship on forged de Lamerie marks is discussed. Nothing in the sources consulted for this dish raises any question about its own marks, its authenticity, or its history of ownership after 1941. Where the Hardwicke record is a story about a mark under suspicion, this dish's own documented history is, so far as it goes, uneventful, and that absence of controversy is itself worth recording plainly rather than manufacturing a problem to match the other record.

A busy final decade

De Lamerie's output did not slow in this period. He had been appointed goldsmith to King George I in 1716, supplied Sir Robert Walpole and the Duke of Bedford among English patrons, and worked for foreign clients including the Russian empresses Catherine I and Anna. His only documented royal commission on record from George II's reign came in 1750, a year before his death: a christening gift, described in the sources as a 'Regium donum,' given on the king's behalf to the Earl of Lincoln at the birth of his son George. He died on 1 August 1751 and was buried at St Anne's Church, Soho, close to the Gerrard Street workshop whose address his last mark records; a memorial plaque was placed at the Gerrard Street site in 1992.

This dish sits inside that late decade of continuing royal and aristocratic custom, made by a workshop whose head was simultaneously judging his own trade's silver at the Hall. Whether this particular commission came from an aristocratic table or a more modest one is not established by any source consulted; only the crests, still unidentified, would say.

One dish from a larger 1941 gift

Cleveland's credit line for 1941.601 reads simply: Gift of Mrs. Otto Miller. The museum's own October 1942 Bulletin fills in the context that the modern object page does not: this dish arrived in 1941 as one piece of a substantial group gift from Mrs. Miller that also included a pair of silver-gilt wine coasters and a cruet stand by Paul Storr, made for the royal goldsmiths Rundell, Bridge and Rundell in 1814-15, a mid-century salver by Ebenezer Coker dated 1769-70, and, outside the silver, Matthew Harris Jouett's portrait of Colonel Thomas Hart Benton. Helen Foote's Bulletin article, titled 'Paul de Lamerie and Paul Storr, English Silversmiths,' was written specifically to introduce the silver portion of this gift to the museum's members.

Neither Cleveland's current catalogue entry nor the 1942 Bulletin records a purchase price, a dealer, or any prior owner for this dish. This record has not been able to identify Mrs. Otto Miller's own collecting history, or to confirm with any fetched source exactly who she was beyond the name on the credit line; a period Cleveland biographical sketch of a bond broker named Otto Miller could not be verified as the same family, and this record does not assert that connection.

The two-hundred-year gap

Between the dish's manufacture in 1745-6 and its appearance in Mrs. Miller's 1941 gift, no owner, sale, or dealer is documented in any source this record has consulted. That is not a small gap to wave past: it covers essentially the entire documented existence of the object before it entered a public collection. Helen Foote's 1942 article, written from whatever information the museum had at the point of accession, offers nothing about the intervening two centuries beyond the object itself. Where this record cannot state a fact, it says so rather than filling the space with a plausible-sounding guess.

Set against the rest of the shop's output

De Lamerie's workshop, across four decades, produced work ranging from the restrained Queen Anne-influenced pieces of his early career to the full rococo idiom for which he is best known today. A useful point of comparison is the Maynard Dish, a large circular presentation dish hallmarked for the Maynard family in the mid-1730s and now at the Metropolitan Museum, whose border of the four elements and grotesque masks is generally credited to an unidentified specialist chaser working for de Lamerie's shop rather than to de Lamerie's own hand. Set beside that dish's dense figural ornament, this Cleveland tray's molded, gadrooned, and cinquefoil-lobed border reads as considerably more architectural and restrained, consistent with the plainer late-1740s pieces more generally associated with his final working decade. This record has not been able to verify who in the workshop chased or finished this particular dish's border; as with the Maynard Dish, division of labor within de Lamerie's shop is well documented as a general practice but not, for this specific object, by name.

What remains open

Two questions matter more than the others. First, whose crest and motto are engraved on the face: without an identified armiger, this dish has no documented patron, only a documented maker. Second, where it was for roughly two hundred years before it reached Cleveland. Both are recorded here as unresolved rather than smoothed over, because a gap honestly stated is worth more to the next researcher than an invented bridge across it.