Creampot

Benjamin Burt

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This charming creampot with elongated scalloped lip and vigorous scrolled handle resembles numerous examples of the form dating from the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Its three cast, pad feet convey a subtle suggestion of movement. This particular example is beautifully engraved with the arms of Brown for the Providence, Rhode Island, merchant Moses Brown (1738–1836) and his wife Anna (1744–1773), set within an elegant asymmetrical cartouche, and clearly the work of an experienced engraver. Surviving correspondence between Moses Brown and the silversmith Benjamin Burt, documents that the engraving was executed by Nathaniel Hurd, another Boston silversmith best known as an engraver, to whom Burt outsourced the engraving. Prior to her January 1764 wedding, Anna had received a munificent bequest from her father, Obadiah Brown (also Moses’s uncle), which enabled her to purchase a handsome array of wedding silver, including this creampot.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art