- Saltcellar (one of a pair)
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Prior to the seventeenth century, salt was a precious commodity. The earliest surviving English salt dishes, dating from the late fifteenth century, were imposing objects securing a prominent position at the table. In colonial America the earliest examples were spool shaped, succeeded in about 1700 by the trencher salt, a simpler form that communicates the increasing availability of the commodity. By the mid-eighteenth century, small circular dishes supported by diminutive cast feet, such as this pair by Joseph Edwards, Jr., became popular.
Related examples: These salt dishes, characteristic of the period, are the only ones recorded from Joseph Edwards’s shop.
Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.
Provenance[William Core Duffy, New Haven, Connecticut]; purchased by MFAH, 1980.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
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