Salver

Simeon Soumaine

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Used in various capacities for the service of food and drink, salvers took their place on the tea table. Small­sized salvers, sometimes called waiters, were occasionally made en suite with flat­bottomed coffeepots as protection for fine wood tables. Popular through the middle decades of the eighteenth century was the so­called piecrust border seen here. These borders were usually raised as one with the flat surface of the salver, but in this case the rim was made separately and soldered to the flat plate. A smaller salver of this type, also marked by Soumaine (35.68.4), is constructed in a similar fashion. When acquired by the Museum in 1933, this salver was said to have belonged originally to John Thurman (b. 1695), a baker and merchant who in 1720 became a freeman, an individual granted the privilege to open a retail shop, to vote, and to hold political office. An estate inventory for Thurman taken on August 18, 1778, lists a sizable collection of plate, but no salver is mentioned, and no documentation has come to light to confirm this provenance.

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