Property from the Collection of Roy J. Zuckerberg
An American Silver Cream Jug, Samuel Casey, Exeter, Rhode Island, Circa 1760
Estimate
6,000 - 9,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
pear form with scalloped rim, multiple scroll handle, on three knee'd pad feet below trefid headers, engraved under base I over I*M, marked under base (Yale 480- 483)
3 oz 5 dwt
101.6 g
height 3 ¾ in.
9.5 cm
Robert Jackson and Ann Gillooly, March 1, 1987
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. 53, p. 110-111
Samuel Casey is probably the only American silversmith sentenced to hanging, then broken out of jail by a sympathetic mob.
Probably trained in Boston, as the spout construction on this piece would suggest, Casey set up in Exeter around 1745 and twenty uneventful years before a 1764 fire started by his forge destroyed his house and shop, leaving him with a huge loss. He moved to Little Rest (now Kingston) and began forging coins, being one of the leaders of a ring. Arrested in 1770 and found guilty, he was awaiting corporal punishment when a mob with their faces obscured attacked the jail and freed him, at which point he tactfully disappeared.
At least two similar cream jugs by Casey are known, with one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Wees/Harvey 2013 p. 295).
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