A SILVER TABLESPOON WITH THE CUSTIS CREST, THOMAS TOOKEY, LONDON, 1774

Col. John Parke Custis (1754-1781), to his son
George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857), to his daughter
Mary Anne Randoph Custis, Mrs. Robert E. Lee (1807-1873), to her son
Robert E. Lee, Jr., to his daughter
Mary Custis Lee, and by descent

This pattern was a particularly popular one in London in the 1770s. The spoons which George Washington ordered from London in 1762 were of Hanoverian pattern, with the tip of the spoon turning upwards and the crest engraved on the reverse (see Buhler 1957, fig. 4, p. 19). However, when he ordered more spoons in 1780 from Richard Humphreys in Philadelphia, the silversmith matched the Old English feathered edge pattern of the Custis flatware (see lot 3 and Buhler 1974, fig. 11, p. 32).

Thomas Tookey was the son of James Tookey, a silversmith who entered a mark as a largeworker in May, 1750. Thomas apprenticed with his father "to learn his art of a spoonmaker" in 1766. His father died by 1773, for his mother Elizabeth Tookey is listed as a soonmaker in that year; an example of the widow continuing her husbands workshop. Spoons by Elizabeth Tookey are in the National Museum of Women in the Arts (see Philippa Glanville and Jennifer Faulds Goldsborough, Women Silversmiths 1685-1845, pl. 90, p. 115). James Tookey is made free of the Goldsmiths' Company May 5, 1773, and entered his first mark in October of that year. His address, appropriately enough, is given as 12 Silver Street.