This teaspoon is jointly stamped by Henry Pepper and Isaac Newton, the latter a name otherwise unrecorded in American silver bibliography. Pepper has struck his stamp in the usual location on the back of the handle, while Newton’s is more prominently located on the front. The positioning of the engraved initials suggests that they were probably completed after the Newton stamp was struck. An Isaac Newton, listed as a tailor, first appears in the 1835–36 Philadelphia directory. By 1847 he is described as a confectionary on Chestnut Street; he was at this address in 1853 when Pepper died.

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.