Cann

A silver drinking cann made in London in 1727, bearing the sponsor's mark of Paul de Lamerie from his first registration at Goldsmiths' Hall and dating, on the strength of that mark chronology, to the Britannia-standard period of his shop before his 1732 move to sterling silver and the rococo work that later made his name. Cleveland's own catalogue records only a donor, George H. Bowman Jr. of Salem, Ohio, who gave the cann to the museum in 1986, and a single in-house exhibition the following year.

The front is engraved with a crest, a griffin's head erased under mantling, that the museum itself says was too widely used to identify a first owner. This is the earliest of four Lamerie pieces now recorded in this archive and the only one from his plainer, pre-rococo first-mark period; the other three, a soup tureen, a tea caddy, and a tray, were all made a decade or more later under his second and third marks. Its own documented history beyond that single gift and exhibition is thin, and this record states that plainly rather than filling the gap.

What it is

A silver drinking vessel of the type the trade calls a cann: a cylindrical body that narrows slightly toward the top, standing on a wide, tiered spreading foot, with a single scroll handle attached at the back. The interior is gilded, a routine measure on eighteenth-century silver drinking vessels that protected the metal from the acids in wine, ale, or punch and kept the taste of bare silver off the drinker's lips. The Cleveland Museum of Art gives its overall dimensions as 32.3 by 14.6 centimetres (12 11/16 by 5 3/4 inches) but does not specify in its public catalogue data which figure is the height and which the width, a gap this record flags rather than guesses at.

The front carries an engraved crest: a griffin's head erased (torn off at the neck rather than cut cleanly, in the language of heraldry) surrounded by mantling worked in the scrollwork style current in the 1720s. The museum's own record states plainly that this crest was widely used by more than one family and that the cann's first owner cannot be identified from it.

A cann, not a mug or a tankard

The three terms are often used loosely by dealers today, but they describe distinct forms. A tankard is typically a larger, straight or barrel-sided vessel with a hinged lid, a thumbpiece to open it, and a scroll handle, made for ale or beer and common in northern Europe and colonial America from the later sixteenth century onward. A cann is smaller and lidless, generally tulip- or baluster-shaped on a spreading foot, and was used for beer, ale, or punch by a single drinker. Cleveland's own catalogue applies the word consistently: a search of the museum's own collection for the term turns up not only this silver piece but an unrelated English creamware vessel of about 1775 also catalogued as a Cann (accession 2012.132), confirming that the museum treats the word as a form name rather than a material or a maker's term.

Dating it: the mark and the standard

Lamerie registered his first mark at Goldsmiths' Hall around 1712-13 (some sources give the precise date of 5 February in the old-style calendar then in use, which fell in early 1713 by the modern reckoning), the letters LA under a crown, in the manner then current among Parisian silversmiths, a nod to his family's own Huguenot, French-trained circle. That mark stayed in use through the 1720s, a period in which he worked in the higher-purity Britannia standard of silver, at 958.4 parts per thousand against sterling's 925. Britannia standard had been compulsory in England from 1697 to 1720, introduced to stop the wholesale clipping and melting of sterling coin; after 1720 goldsmiths were free to return to sterling, but Lamerie is recorded as continuing to work largely in Britannia standard until 1732, when he entered his second official mark and moved over to sterling, a change later writers on his work connect to the fact that the softer sterling alloy took the crisp rococo ornament of his mature style better than the still purer Britannia metal.

A cann made in 1727 therefore falls inside that first-mark, Britannia-standard period of Lamerie's career, a decade or more before the ornamented rococo silver for which he later became best known. This record has not been able to confirm the specific assay marks stamped on this particular cann (the Britannia figure and the lion's-head-erased town mark that identify Britannia standard silver, as opposed to a later sterling lion passant) because the museum's published data records the sponsor's mark and the date but not a transcription of the individual hallmarks themselves. The 1727 dating and its placement in the Britannia-standard period rest on Lamerie's documented mark chronology rather than on a direct reading of this cann's own hallmarks, and that distinction is worth keeping in mind.

The sponsor's mark, and what it does not prove

Lamerie ran one of the largest goldsmith's workshops in London, and the volume of silver stamped with his mark across a forty-year career makes it effectively certain that he did not personally raise every piece bearing it. English silver marking of the period functioned as a sponsor's mark: it recorded which goldsmith submitted an item to the assay office and took legal responsibility for its standard of fineness, not which pair of hands actually worked the metal. A large shop like Lamerie's would have employed journeymen, specialist chasers and engravers, and at times subcontracted whole pieces to independent workshops, all sold and marked under the name of the shop's principal. That convention is standard across the London goldsmiths' trade in this period and is not particular to Lamerie, though the fame and market value that now attach to his name make the distinction matter more for his output than for most.

The crest and an unidentifiable first owner

The engraved decoration is the one part of the object that speaks to who it was originally made for, and it speaks only partially. A griffin's head erased is a common heraldic charge, carried as a crest by numerous unrelated English families in the eighteenth century; a griffin conventionally signified vigilance and courage in the generic vocabulary of heraldry, a meaning attached to the charge as a device rather than to any specific family or commission. The Cleveland Museum of Art states outright, in its own catalogue entry for this object, that the crest's wide use across families means the first owner cannot be identified from it. No armorial matching this crest to a named patron has turned up in the sources consulted for this record.

A separate description that appears to be the museum's own auto-generated image caption, rather than curatorial prose, characterizes the front engraving as showing 'a central oval containing a standing figure, framed by swirling scrolls and winged children' with 'a small face' anchoring the bottom of the frame. That reads as a fuller achievement of arms, of the kind that combines a shield or cartouche, supporting figures, putti, and a mask within elaborate mantling, than the single unaccompanied crest described in the museum's structured inscriptions field. This record cannot resolve whether the two descriptions refer to the same engraving seen differently or to two distinct elements of it, and flags the question rather than picking one account over the other.

How it reached Cleveland

The museum's catalogue names George H. Bowman, Jr. of Salem, Ohio as the donor and immediate prior owner, and the credit line reads 'Gift of Geo. H. Bowman Jr., Salem, Ohio.' The gift was accessioned in 1986 as 1986.206. The only exhibition history the museum's own record carries for this object is an in-house showing, 'Year in Review for 1986,' at the Cleveland Museum of Art from February 4 to March 15, 1987, the kind of annual survey a museum mounts to show recent acquisitions to its own members rather than a scholarly loan exhibition.

Salem, Ohio was home to a retail firm trading as Geo. H. Bowman and Son Co., a seller of fine housewares and china in the early-to-mid twentieth century; whether the donor of this cann was connected to that firm, and if so how, is not established by any source consulted for this record and should not be assumed.

Where this cann sits among Cleveland's Lamerie silver

This is the fourth piece bearing Lamerie's mark recorded in this archive and the third held by the Cleveland Museum of Art specifically, alongside the museum's Lamerie tea caddy (accession 1943.179, hallmarked for the London assay year 1741-42) and the museum's Lamerie tray (accession 1941.601, dated 1745-46). A fourth piece, the Newdigate Centrepiece, is recorded in this archive without a photograph. All three of the other Cleveland-area and archive-catalogued pieces come from later in Lamerie's career, after his move to the sterling standard and into the ornamented style associated with his mature rococo work; the tureen at the Portland Art Museum (accession 69.45a-c) dates to 1737-38, the tea caddy to 1741-42, and the tray to 1745-46, all bearing his second or third registered marks.

This cann, dated 1727, predates every one of them by ten to nineteen years and is the only piece in this archive's Lamerie group made under his first mark, in the Britannia-standard period of his shop's output, before the change of standard in 1732 and well before the fully developed rococo ornament of his later commissions. It belongs to an earlier, plainer phase of his career than any other Lamerie object this archive currently records.

Comparanda: how rare Lamerie's mugs and canns actually are

Drinking mugs and canns are an unusual form within Lamerie's surviving output. Museum cataloguing of a related example, a plain silver mug hallmarked 1720-21 now in the Victoria and Albert Museum on loan from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, states that mugs and tankards are curiously uncommon among his known work, with fewer than half a dozen recorded, all plain, spanning the years 1713 to 1746. That V&A mug is one of a pair; its match, hallmarked a year earlier in 1719, is in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg. Both fall, like this cann, inside Lamerie's earlier, plainer output before his shop turned to the elaborate rococo commissions of the 1730s and 1740s.

Other silver from the same narrow window survives to show what Lamerie's shop was producing around 1727: a dish and an ewer made for Baron George Anson of Soberton in the same assay year, 1726-27, now in the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a plain sauce pan of 1723 in the Huntington Art Museum, both unornamented Britannia-standard pieces consistent with the restrained 'Queen Anne style' that characterized much of his output before the 1730s. A Britannia-gauge waiter of 1732, marked with crests for Charles, 1st Viscount Fane and his wife Mary Stanhope, records the moment Lamerie's shop still worked to the higher standard on the very cusp of the change to sterling.

What the record does not know

No provenance links this cann to a named owner between its making in 1727 and its documented ownership by George H. Bowman, Jr. of Salem, Ohio in the twentieth century. No dealer, auction record, family history, or publication has been found connecting the object to a specific commission, patron, or intervening collection. No scholarly literature on Lamerie consulted for this record, including general surveys of his career and catalogues of comparable pieces in other public collections, cites this cann specifically. Where the Hardwicke Tureen, the Cleveland tea caddy, and the Cleveland tray each carry some documented thread of ownership, exhibition, or published discussion beyond the bare museum accession, this cann's own history, on the evidence available, does not extend past a single donor's name and a single in-house exhibition the year after it entered the collection. That thinness is itself the finding, and this record states it rather than filling the gap with inference.