Kettle
1724-1725
The "Queen Anne" style
kettle, with its stand and spirit burner and its accompanying silver table, is
the most important surviving work of the celebrated Huguenot silversmith Simon
Pantin, who was active in London
in the first three decades of the eighteenth century.
Pantin enjoyed the patronage of influential fashionable clients, including the
king. The owners of this piece of tea equipment, George Bowes and his wife
Eleanor Verney, daughter and sole heir of an immensely wealthy father, lived in Yorkshire.
Their combined coats
of arms are engraved on the kettle, stand, and tabletop, which, somewhat
unusually, can be unscrewed from the table shaft to form a salver standing on
four feet. The shape of these feet, the octagonal forms of the tabletop with its
upwardly curving rim, and the octagonal plan of the kettle itself derive from
Chinese forms that were familiar in London at the time in imported lacquers and porcelains.
The table tripod and shaft, however, were inspired by contemporary wood
furniture.
