Oval salt dishes were a popular eighteenth-century form, fashioned in both the Rococo and Neoclassical idioms. In the United States their designs were derived from imported English silver and silverplate. The Bayou Bend salt is an ambitious elucidation of Neoclassicism, possessing a naive charm that reveals the work of a talented craftsman.

Technical notes: The base is a cut-out oval. The body is seamed on the side. The pearlwork border appears to be handworked. The red glass liner may be original.

Related examples: Most closely related is a pair engraved for Maria Egberts (1748–1819), in Rice 1964, p. 30. In 1776 she married Antony Ten Eyck, a son of Jacob C. Ten Eyck (1705–1793), the Albany silversmith, and a brother of Conradt, who originally owned Bayou Bend’s salt. While it would be natural to assume that their silver was a product of the Ten Eyck shop, the Egberts’s salts are marked with Jacob Gerritse Lansing’s stamp. They are supported by cast scrolled legs seemingly identical to those on the Bayou Bend salt and retain what are believed to be their original red glass liners. The visual and family relationships between these objects is the basis for attributing the Bayou Bend salt.

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.