The substitution of small cast feet for a central foot facilitated the salver’s use; with its center of gravity closer to the table top, it became more stable. Replacing the cusped rim was a cast shell-and-scroll design similar to those on the tops of Rococo tea tables. The cast supports also relate to furniture as miniature versions of pad, trifid, scroll, and ball-and-claw feet. Salvers were complicated forms to produce, from fashioning a flat sheet by hand to casting and assembling the border sections. Their diameters varied, as did their name and use. Joseph Richardson ordered “waiters” as stands for teapots and coffeepots, while another Philadelphia silversmith, Edmund Milne, advertised “waiters, chased and plain, holding from 3 to 12 glasses. . . “

Related examples: Buhler and Hood 1970, vol. 2, pp. 215–16, no. 887. It also recalls one stamped by the London silversmith Richard Rugg that belonged to George Mason IV (1725–1792), in Brown 1980, pp. 287–88.

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.