# Tray > Paul de Lamerie - 1745-1746 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/paul-de-lamerie/lamerie-tray-cleveland/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-20 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Paul de Lamerie - **Date:** 1745-1746 - **Medium:** Silver - **Dimensions:** 29.2 x 41.8 cm (11 1/2 x 16 7/16 in.), overall - **Object type:** Silver - **Period:** Georgian, mid-eighteenth century - **Current location:** Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## 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. - **1745-1746** Unidentified original patron (bore a lion crest and a shield with the motto TOUT EST VANITE) `[documented]` (manufacture) Manufacture and date are established by the maker's mark (de Lamerie's third mark, entered 1739) and the London hallmarks read by Cleveland's catalogue as 1745-46. The identity of the patron who commissioned it and bore the engraved crests is not established by any source consulted; the armorial bearings have not been matched to a specific family here. - **1745-1746-1941** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, dealer, or sale is documented for this dish across the nearly two centuries between its manufacture and its appearance in the Otto Miller gift. Neither Cleveland's current catalogue nor the museum's 1942 Bulletin article announcing the gift records any earlier provenance. - **1941** Mrs. Otto Miller, Cleveland `[documented]` (gift) Given to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1941 as part of a larger gift that also included Paul Storr coasters and a cruet stand (1814-15), an Ebenezer Coker salver (1769-70), and Matthew Harris Jouett's portrait of Colonel Thomas Hart Benton. No purchase price or dealer is recorded for the silver in the sources consulted. This record has not been able to independently confirm Mrs. Miller's identity beyond the name on the credit line and the museum's own 1942 account of the gift. - **1941-present** Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1941.601) `[documented]` (accession and current holding) Held in the Department of Decorative Art and Design. Cleveland's own catalogue records the object as not currently on view as of this record's last verification. ## Open questions - Who was the original patron: whose lion crest and whose motto, TOUT EST VANITE, are engraved on the face? No source consulted identifies the armorial bearings or matches them to a family. - Where was the dish between its manufacture in 1745-6 and its appearance in the Otto Miller gift of 1941? No owner, dealer, or sale is documented across that span in any source this record has found. - Does the 'No 4' scratched on the underside mean this dish was one of a larger numbered set or dinner service, as Helen Foote's 1942 description speculated? No sibling pieces bearing a matching crest or scratch number have been identified here. - What was Mrs. Otto Miller's own collecting history, and how and from whom did she acquire this dish and the rest of the 1941 gift? Cleveland's records as consulted do not say. - Who chased or finished the applied ornament on this dish within de Lamerie's workshop? Division of labor in his shop is documented as a general practice but not, for this specific object, by name. ## Sources - [1] Cleveland Museum of Art, object page for Tray, accession 1941.601. - [2] Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API, object record 120890 (Tray, 1941.601), including catalogued inscriptions, dimensions, and citation list. - [3] Cleveland Museum of Art, object page for Decanter Stand by Paul Storr, accession 1941.598, part of the same 1941 Otto Miller gift. - [4] Helen S. Foote, 'Paul de Lamerie and Paul Storr, English Silversmiths,' The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 29, no. 8 (October 1942): 121-123, including the note on the Jouett portrait gift on the same page (p. 78 of the scanned issue). - [5] silvercollection.it, 'Paul De Lamerie,' for the three registered maker's marks and their dates and addresses. A specialist dealer reference site; flagged for replacement with published scholarship such as Susan Hare, ed., Paul de Lamerie: At the Sign of the Golden Ball (Goldsmiths' Company, 1990). - [6] Huguenots of Spitalfields, 'LAMERIE, Paul de,' for biography, Goldsmiths' Company wardenships, royal appointment, clientele, death and burial. A tertiary biographical site; flagged for replacement with the Goldsmiths' Company's own archival record. - [7] The Silver Society, 'Identify Your Silver,' for the mechanics of English hallmarking (town mark, standard mark, date letter, maker's mark). - [8] Wikipedia, 'Pennyweight,' for the troy-weight unit convention (20 pennyweight to the troy ounce) used to interpret the scratched underside notation. Tertiary source, cited only for the unit system, not for any object-specific fact. - [9] Koopman Rare Art, 'The Mystery of the Maynard Master,' on the Maynard Dish and its unidentified chaser. Direct fetch was blocked (403); content drawn from search-indexed text and treated cautiously in the narrative. Flagged for replacement with the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue entry once accessible. - [10] Wikimedia Commons file page, confirming CC0 licensing for the Cleveland Museum of Art's own open-access photograph of this tray. - [11] Wikimedia Commons file page, confirming public-domain licensing for the Hardwicke Soup Tureen comparison photograph. - [12] Wikimedia Commons file page, confirming CC0 licensing for the Huntington Museum tea caddy comparison photograph. - [13] Wikimedia Commons file page, confirming public-domain licensing for the Fowler Museum Anson dish comparison photograph. --- 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.