A Chinese silver-gilt wine ewer, unmarked, late 17th or early 18th century

The crest is that of Hervey, Earls of Bristol, for John Hervey (1665-1751) who was created 1^st Earl of Bristol (of the second creation) in October 1714.

Detailed accounts of the 1st Earl's silver purchases and repairs from 1688-1750 are held in the Suffolk Record Office¹. However, no reference can be found for an item matching the current lot, although it may have been part of the 115 ounces of unspecified silver which he acquired from the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Felton, on 6 October 1709 or part of the silver from the estate of his wife's aunt, Susan Felton, Lady Howard of Effingham, on 23 April 1727 for which he paid £58-04-0. The ewer is not listed in the 5th Earl's inventory of plate taken in 1811², and so it most likely left the family's possession in the intervening years, possibly as part of the 2nd Earl's efforts to refashion and modernise his father's silver in the 1750s.

A very similar wine ewer with identical handle, spout and neck panels, was sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet, 16 December 1976, lot 40, as part of the Dick Family Silver collection. The cataloguing describes it as engraved 'N.1, 19=10 above traces of a crest and a coronet'. The similarities of the designs and the engraved inscriptions strongly suggest that they were both once owned and kept together by the 1st Earl.

The current lot is one of a number of similarly shaped ewers which have been the subject of recent research in which it has been proposed that they were the work of Chinese silversmiths working in Nagasaki, Japan.³ In 1700 around 15% of the population of Nagasaki was Chinese who traded with the Dutch resident in Batavia. With tea drinking becoming a fashionable and expensive luxury, the Chinese craftsmen produced gold and silver vessels for serving and drinking tea to sell to a European market with limited understanding of the tea ceremony and the use of traditional stoneware pots.

The design of the current lot seems to be based on Chinese and Japanese ewers for serving rice wine. A Chinese silver wine ewer of this form was presented to Louis XIV by Siamese ambassadors as a diplomatic gift on behalf of the King of Siam (Thailand) in 1686. It was re-acquired by the Palace of Versailles, France in 2018. For other similar examples of this form in addition to the example above sold in 1976 see Christie's, London, 8 December 1948, lot 22 (including a stand); Sotheby's, London, 21 February 1980, lot 82; Sotheby's London, 1 November 2018, lot 615; and Bonhams London, 17 May 2018, lot 226.

Notes

1. Suffolk Record Office, ref. 941/46/13-14

2. Ibid, ref. 941/75/1

3. John Hawkins, 'Chinese Silversmiths Working in Nagasaki between 1660 and 1880,' Silver Studies No.33, 2016-17, pp.139-158