Tankard

Description

The singular commission for six matching tankards with the intended use for the communion service was initiated by a woman for her parish church. It preserves a rising trend within New England’s Protestant churches to adopt uniform sets of silver vessels. The donor, Mary Pape Bartlett, did not survive to see the tankards made, but her will written in 1762 was very specific, stipulating: "two third parts of my Estate Remaining to ye Church in the third Precinct in the Town of Brookfield to be Laid out in Silver vessells for ye Communion Table and the Vessells to be Engraven with my name and when ye vessells are made to be Delivered by my Executor to such person or Persons as Said Church shall appoint to receive ye same and my will is that my Late Husband's name Shall be Engraven on ye vessells with my own." Mrs. Barlett’s executor, a deacon in the church, placed the commission for altar silver to the amount of two-thirds of her estate (valued at 141.16.0 British pounds sterling). This impressive gift resulted in tankards weighing almost 150 ounces troy in total. In early 1769 the executor entrusted a Boston jeweler and silversmith Jonathan Trott (1730-1815) to fulfill the will’s instructions. Trott in turn placed a request for silver vessels with Paul Revere’s workshop. The Revere daybook records in January 1772 six silver wine quart tankards for Trott, who acquired them for the church after the bill was settled. Each tankard is engraved as Mary Bartlett requested and with the date 1768, likely to commemorate her death. These elegant, lidded vessels remained preserved through generations of the church in Brookfield, although the awkward use of tankards for communion wine soon fell out of fashion. Their survival as the largest complete set of tankards became notable with early twentieth-century appreciation for colonial silver and increased national recognition for Paul Revere’s silver. A comparison of all six tankards yields only subtle differences; they are remarkable testaments for the consistency of handwrought artistry from his workshop.