A Large American Silver Teapot, William Ball, Baltimore, Maryland, 1789-1815

Jonathan Trace, Portsmouth, NH, February 14, 2014

Jeanne Sloane, Artistry and Enterprise: American Silver 1660-1790 - Survey of American Colonial silver held in the collection of Roy J. Zuckerberg, New York, Smallwood & Stewart, 2018, no. 149, p. 292-293

Although Baltimore would be known for embossed and chased silver in the 19^th century, it was not an 18^th century taste among Baltimore makers.  This teapot and the companion coffee pot (preceding lot) are two of the three known Baltimore repoussé pieces from before 1800, with the teapot by Gabriel Lewyn of circa 1770 in the Yale University Art Gallery.

Colonial Maryland imported embossed English silver, as planters placed orders with their London factors. The work of Thomas Whipham and Charles Wright, known particularly for their embossed teawares, was common in the Colony; examples by these makers were owned by Charles Carroll the Signer (coffee pot, 1763, Maryland Historical Society) and William Paca (pair of canns, also 1763, sold Sotheby’s, New York, 25 January 2025, lot 197). Jeanne Sloane found “virtually identical” chasing to the Zuckerberg pieces on a coffee pot by Whipham and Wright, 1763, sold Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Chicago, 20 November 2012, lot 0011.  Whipham and Wright pots with similarly “spare” floral branches as the offered lot are one of 1762 sold Heritage Auctions, Dallas, 20 May 2021, lot 74384, and another of 1760 sold Leland Little Auctions, 16 March 2023, lot 1640.  The model of spout used here, with three overlapping ruffled edges, was also in circulation in London, appearing on pots by William Grundy of the late 1760s, such as one sold Sotheby’s, London, 14 June 1984, lot 281.

The prototypes thus were in Maryland, but it is surprising to find them by William Ball, who begins work in 1789 - when rococo is definitely on the wane. Almost everything else know with Ball’s mark is what would be expected for his working dates of 1789-1815; clean neoclassical forms with bright-cut and engraved decoration. In this environment, the Zuckerberg pieces must have been a special commission, perhaps to extend a set of existing rococo pieces, or possibly for a child who did not inherit an earlier-made group but wanted to take it as a model. Both coffee pot and teapot have been “super-sized”, to the grand scale popular in the late 1780s and very early 1790s. Joseph and Nathanial Richardson make similarly large-scaled coffee pots, some with rococo vestiges like cast spouts, but none yet found which go so far as to replicate the embossed rococo decoration of twenty to thirty years before.

Creating this decoration, so far outside Ball’s usual workshop practice, probably involved an immigrant chaser from Europe, of the type who regularly advertised in 18^th century American newspapers. Sotheby’s London specialist Miles Harrison has suggested that the Zuckerberg chasing has an Irish feel to his eye, and certainly Ireland was one of the great centers for rococo chasing. As a Catholic colony, now state, Maryland would have been particularly attractive to an Irish craftsman, perhaps trained in Dublin in the 1770s and now recalling that skill in neoclassical Baltimore – where the next generation would heartily re-embrace embossed rococo silver.