An Important Set Of Twelve George III Silver Dinner Plates Designed by Robert Adam, John Carter II, Retailed by Joseph Creswell, London, 1773

Sotheby's, London, 10 October 1946, lots 98-104 (part)

The arms are those of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn impaling Grenville for 4th Bart. MP for Denbigh and his second wife Charlotte, daughter of the Rt. Hon. George Grenville and sister of the Marquess of Buckingham, whom he married in 1771.

These plates are part of the neoclassical dinner service designed by Robert Adam for Williams-Wynn, one of the wealthiest landowners in Wales, at 20 St. James Square, London. With designs dated mostly 1773,¹ it is the only known commission where Adam created not just the room and its furnishings, but also the tablewares. The silver represents a total re-imagining of the standard forms through the architect’s eyes; the tureens, sauce boats, candelabra, and even salts broke with their contemporary precedents.

What could an avant-garde architect do to redesign a dinner plate? A surprising amount, in fact. Adam rejected the lobed edge that had been standard for plates for the previous thirty-plus years, in favor of a return to the simple circle – which also echoed the pattern of circles and octagons in the ceiling of Williams-Wynn’s dining room. The ornate engraved armorial cartouches of the rococo period were stripped down here to a simple wreath of laurel or husks, an overt classical reference. Probably the most innovative aspect, though, is the applied inner rim; before this, plates had one applied rim at the edge, then a wide flat border to the cavetto. A second raised rim, within the first, was a startling break with what had gone before in English dinner plates.

Adam provided the designs to the patron, but the executants had their own ties to the architect. Joseph Creswell, the retailer through whom Williams-Wynn ordered the service, was located in the Adelphi, the fashionable neoclassical terrace developed by the Adam brothers. John Carter II, the manufacturing silversmith who created the plates, had been making silver to Adam’s designs since at least 1767.²

Descended in the family until 1946, today much of the Williams-Wynn service is in museums: the punch bowl and soup tureen in the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff; a pair of sauce boats in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; a salt in the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery; and a pair of circular platters matching the plates in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. This attests to the importance of this rare moment of direct architect intervention in the design of English table silver.

Notes

1. Oliver Fairclough, “Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn and Robert Adam: Commissions for Silver 1768-80,” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 37, no. 1107 (June 1995), p. 379.

2. Christopher Hartop, The Classical Ideal: English Silver, 1760-1840. London: Koopman Rare Art, 2010, p. 24.