C ollecting antique silver is not a new activity. As early as the 18th century, silver objects were sought for their historical associations by those with antiquarian interests, while ‘name recognition’, an essential ingredient of any market, has also a long history in silver. Paul de Lamerie (1688-1751),  the Huguenot who is the best-known silversmith working in London during the 18th century, has enjoyed an unrivalled reputation since his death, when an obituary published in the London Evening Post  spoke of him as ‘particularly famous in making fine ornamental Plate, and ... very instrumental in bringing that Branch of the Trade to the Perfection it is now in’. In Christie’s sale catalogue of the Duke of Sussex’s silver collection, which took place in 1843,  a tea urn is described as ‘in the beautiful taste of Paul L’Emery’, and some 20 years later, the cataloguer of the Antiquaries and Works of Art exhibition held at Ironmongers’ Hall in 1861, compared a flask exhibited by Messrs Lambert to one made ’by Paul ’Emere in the reign of King William III, 1688-1703, ... given by Queen Anne to the great Duke of Marlborough’. 2 The confusion in dates notwithstanding, it shows the power of Lamerie’s name in providing a standard by which silver creations were judged. In the years that followed the 1861 exhibition, as the records of the Goldsmiths’ Company were studied and the complex system of official marks, known as hallmarks, and the silversmiths’ own marks, was unravelled, for many collectors of old silver, the pursuit had all the excitement of detective work. This period of growing interest in collecting antique silver at the end of the 19th century coincided with silver’s decline as a necessary symbol of one’s place in society. For an 18th century nobleman, just as for his medieval counterpart, a splendid display of silverware had been vital; as Norbert Elias comments, ‘what in retrospect generally appears to us as a “luxury“ is... anything but superfluous in a society so constricted ... In a society where every outward manifestation of a person has special significance, expenditure on prestige and display is for the upper classes a necessity which they cannot avoid.’ 3 In interior decoration, the move during this period towards what Vita Sackville-West described as ‘expensive simplicity’ which eliminated ‘unnecessary objects’ 4 meant that for the first time since the middle ages silver had little place in fashionable interiors and for the most part it was relegated to the collector’s cabinet for much of the 20th century. The post-war ‘servant problem’ provided the excuse for having little or no silver about the house and where silver did appear, on the dining or tea table, prevailing taste dictated that it be severely plain in what was dubbed the ‘Queen Anne style’. A sort of inverted snobbery against elaborate silver continues to surface today from time to time, as in the art critic Brian Sewell’s article about the Gilbert collection of gold and silver destined to be displayed at Somerset House, which appeared in the London Evening Standard  on 15 January 1998: ‘Anything made of silver, preferably gilt, that is ostentatious, prodigious, extravagant, profusely decorated, overwhelmingly large for its declared purpose, monstrous vulgarity its dominant characteristic, has a place in the Gilbert collection.’ This 20th-century puritanism, combined with the selective survival process which silver, due to the intrinsic value of its material undergoes (by which the more elaborate objects are more likely to end up in the melting pot than plain, utilitarian, pieces) means that we often have a very distorted picture of what it was like to have been invited to dine, for example, by a Whig grandee in the early 18th century. Our understanding, not only of how silver was used, but how it was designed, made and ultimately supplied to patrons, has also been bedevilled by an idealization of the ‘artist-craftsman’ which has often obscured the complex, hidden, web of specialist workers who made up the silver trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early writers studied the misleadingly termed ‘maker’s marks’ struck on pieces and believed that they signified authorship, although it is clear to us today that the great majority of piece made in the 18th century could not have been made by one craftsman working in isolation at his bench. The ‘maker’s mark’ is in fact better called the ‘sponsor’s mark’, as it gives the identity of the member of the Goldsmiths’ Company who submitted the finished article to the assay office prior to offering it for sale. It provides no clue to the specialists who may have worked on the piece, or whether the sponsor was merely the retailer. Additionally, immigrant craftsmen, whether Huguenot refugees or others attracted to London by the opportunities it afforded, often worked outside the jurisdiction of the city guilds and had to rely on established colleagues to get their work marked. In 1715 it was alleged that Paul de Lamerie, already well-established, ‘covered Foreigners work and got ye same toucht at ye Hall’; in this he was doubtless using the pool of talent, well-versed in the latest industrial techniques that the Huguenot diaspora threw up in London at the end of the 17th century. 5 This community of immigrant craftsmen, and its impact on the silver of the period, has often been misunderstood. When, in 1930, Joan Evans remarked that ‘any history of the craft in England from 1680-1775 must chiefly concern itself with Huguenot smiths’, silver studies were still primarily focused on the maker’s mark and subsequent writers dwelt almost entirely on assembling an œuvre for figures like Paul de Lamerie, Paul Crespin, David Willaume, Simon Pantin, Louis Mettayer and Pierre Platel. More recent scholarship has shown that the picture is a good deal more complicated than this, and by concentrating on these ‘names’ we have ignored the trade’s complex specialization. The influence of other groups of foreign craftsmen, from Germany and elsewhere, as well as Catholic workers from France, who unlike their Huguenot fellow-countrymen, were able to travel to and from their homeland and disseminate the latest French designs and techniques, has largely been ignored. The collection of London-made silver formed by Alan and Simone Hartman of New York City during the past 15 years is unlike most formed during the 20th century. The difference is due to the fact that Mr and Mrs Hartman followed none of the conventional routes in silver collecting; they have little interest in the marks struck on pieces (a number of the objects in the collection are unmarked), nor did they set out to seek any of the great ‘names’ of the silver collecting world, nor did they concentrate on any one form or style. Their attraction to silver is in its sculptural qualities as well as the aesthetics of its patina, and their overriding criterion has been one of quality and condition. They set out to form a collection of the best pieces available made during this period. The result is an overview of silver as it was made and used during the period which illustrates well the problems of studying the silver trade during the period; interestingly some two-thirds of the objects are struck with the marks of Huguenot silversmiths, while the rest bear ‘native’ or non-Huguenot immigrants’ marks.    The organization of the silver manufacturing and retail trade during the period has been at the forefront of silver studies in recent years and the Hartman collection provides us with an opportunity to look at patterns of supply in the trade. Two octagonal coffee pots in the collection [plates 1 and 2] illustrate the complexity of the trade during the period: the first, of 1713-14, is struck with the mark of Richard Bayley, a ‘native’ silversmith, while the second, made two years later, bears the mark of a Huguenot silversmith, Simon Pantin. The reality is neither Pantin nor Bayley probably ‘made’ these pots; each one is a product of a series of specialized techniques involving a number of specialized journeyman craftsmen, either working in their workshops or elsewhere. The cast components of both, such as the handle sockets, the finials, the spouts and the mouldings, are most likely to have been produced in specialist workshops. Yet it is not merely the structure of the trade that needs reappraisal; the fact that one pot bears the mark of a Huguenot and the other a non-Huguenot shows how widespread the plain geometric style was at the time. Writers in the past have often referred to this plain style as ‘Huguenot’ and implied that the Huguenots’ low Protestantism fostered this trend towards the unadorned, just as 19th century amateurs dubbed the simple spoon with flat, plain handles popular at the beginning of the 17th century ‘Puritan’ spoons. In reality, religion had nothing to do with the fashion of plain silver, which was common across all Europe, including Iberia, during the period. Plain silver was produced alongside elaborately decorated articles throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and both were produced by Huguenot and non-Huguenot alike. Moreover, geometric shapes such as the octagon used in these coffee pots have no precedent in contemporary French silver and owe their origins to Chinese ceramics being brought into London in increasing quantities during the period. It was the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner who identified the absorption of outside influences as a constant theme in English art in a celebrated series of Reith lectures, for the BBC in the 1950s. 6 In silver we can see the influence of successive waves of immigration from the middle ages onwards. the most significant, because of sheer numbers, were the Protestants who came in the second half of the 16th century from Flanders and those who fled Louis XIV’s persecution at the end of the 17th century. Not all ‘strangers’ were religious refugees however. Christian van Vianen, one of the famous Flemish dynasty of designers and modellers, came to England at the behest of Charles I and returned again after the Restoration. His son-in-law, John Coquus, also from Flanders, worked for Charles II’s court and even managed to register his own mark with the Goldsmiths’ Company. Others, like Jacob Bodendijk from Germany and Wolfgang Howzer from Switzerland, came to London after the Restoration because of the great economic opportunities it offered. Many superior technical skills and innovations in style and decoration were introduced to English silver by these immigrants some years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes caused a flood of Huguenot immigration to England after 1685. Superior casting techniques can be seen on a small group of silver articles of pronounced German influence made in London in the 1670s and 80s, such as the magnificent tankard of 1686-7 in the Hartman collection [plate 3]. Most London-made tankards of this period are plain cylinders made of thin gauge silver, with decoration limited to naively-chased foliage. This example, with its boldly-modelled and cast auricular handle and mouldings, is technically far superior and is far more similar to German examples than most London-made silver of the period. Once again, the hallmarks and maker’s marks struck on it provide us with little clue as to the craftsmen involved in its production. The mark WI can be attributed with some certainty to one William Jennings, an Englishman who is recorded as occupying a shop in the newly fashionable Pall Mall in 1686.7 It is most likely, however, that Jennings operated a retail establishment from this address and, judging from the quality of this tankard and the handful of other pieces surviving that bear this mark, it is evident that he employed German craftsmen in his workshop, or bought finished or semi-finished plate from immigrés who were unable, due to the restrictive regulations of the City trade guilds, to submit their work for assay at Goldsmiths’ Hall themselves. We can also attribute to these immigrants the introduction of a number of new decorative features during the Restoration period, such as ‘cut-card’ work, which was imported from France in the 1660s. This technique, which involves applying patterns cut from sheet silver on to the surface of a vessel, is extremely difficult and early English attempts are often crude. With the arrival of the Huguenots, however, cut-card work becomes much more commonplace and as good in quality as it is on Paris-made silver of the period. Similarly, the vase-shaped two-handled cup, so popular in English silver throughout the 18th century, has often been cited as a Huguenot innovation (although without parallel in contemporary French silver). Hugh Tait has successfully shown that this too had developed fully during the Restoration years well before the arrival of the Huguenots.8 These two instances point us to the true nature of the Huguenot ‘revolution’ in English silver: their importance to the development of style as well as the structure of the trade lay in the timing of their arrival, for they provided a skilled workforce, at just the right moment, to fill burgeoning consumer demand, while their refugee status made them all the more eager to work harder and for less money than their English counterparts. As late as 1711, 25 years after the revocation, in a letter to a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company reprimanding him for excessive use of solder, it stated that ‘... partly by the general decay of trade and other ways by the intrusion of foreigners ... by the admittance of necessitous strangers whose desperate fortunes obliged them to work at miserable rates, the representing members have been forced to bestow much more time and labour working up their plate than hath been the practice of former times, when prices of workmanship were greater.’ 9 In preparing the catalogue of the Hartman collection it seemed sensible to ignore the conventional wisdom of ordering it chronologically, or by the maker’s marks struck on the pieces, and instead to arrange it by function, dividing it into broad categories of silver for display, for dining and drinking, for coffee, tea and chocolate, for lighting, and for the bedroom and writing table. Silver has to be eminently adaptable and the original functions of some objects are still open to conjecture. One of the most intriguing of these is one of the earliest pieces in the collection, a heavy stand some seven inches in diameter [plate 4], which has puzzled writers on silver since it first appeared on the market in 1904. The top is engraved with the arms of Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset (1662-1748), who was known as the Proud Duke on account of his obsession with rank and protocol. The stand was hallmarked in 1689, and because of the duke’s role in the coronation of William and Mary in that year, where he bore the queen’s crown, it had been suggested that it may be a stand for a crown. Certain officers of state were traditionally given an allowance of plate for their role in state occasions, and Somerset may well have received a piece of plate after the ceremony (the Jewel House accounts are too sketchy during this period to be conclusive), but it is unlikely that he would have felt it necessary to keep such a stand. A clue, however, to its possible function is provided in the archives of Petworth, the duke’s house in Sussex, which he extensively remodelled and enlarged during this period. As in most house accounts, silverware figures only rarely (purchases of plate, as capital expenditure, are more to be found in bankers’, rather than household, accounts) but there are some purchases of silverware in the miscellaneous expenditure book of John Bowen, the duke’s comptroller, for 1689-90. One of these records ‘... to Mr Rogers for a stand for the Middle of a Table, weighing 68 ounces 16d weights at 6s-6d the ounce £221-6s-6d’. 10 ‘Stands for the table’ are mentioned in 17th-century inventories done at Knole and in October 1705 ‘a pair of stands’ was included in a parcel of plate sent by the Sackville family, the owners of Knole, to the silversmith Anthony Nelme, presumably for refashioning. 11 Such stands were essential during the 17th century, when each course was laid out at dinner on oval and circular dishes. Space on a dinner table was therefore at a premium and, as Randle Holme in his Academy of Armoury of 1688 describes, ‘which kind of stands, being so sett, make the feast looke full and noble, as if there were two tables, or one dish over another.’ 12    The stand bears, in addition to hallmarks for 1689-90, the maker’s mark traditionally attributed to Pierre Harache the elder, who came, it is believed, from a long line of silver workers in Rouen. Unlike most of his fellow Huguenots, Harache managed to leave France well before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and took with him many of his assets, for on 20 October 1681 he is recorded as being granted customs-free delivery of plate brought by him from France.13 The mark attributed to Harache appears as early as 1683 on a set of candlesticks made for Lord Spencer but there is uncertainty regarding Harache’s date of death. When the enforced higher silver standard was introduced in 1697, requiring all silver smiths to register new makers’ marks, a Pierre Harache entered a new mark, but it now looks likely that this was Pierre’s son, who was born about 1653, for in the Petworth archives, the same book of accounts records a payment to ‘Mrs Harrache’ for a dish, suggesting that by 1690 Pierre the elder was already dead and his business continued by his widow. Silver from the Harache workshop is among the best produced during the last decades of the 17th century. The bold gadroons and faceted angles on this stand are typical of the ponderous classicism typical of Louis XIV’s reign and, while the lack of more than a handful of surviving French-made examples make a close comparison difficult, it is likely that this stand is a direct copy of a Paris-made piece. Other pieces in the Hartman collection copy French prototypes exactly, such as the wine cooler of 1718-19 with the mark of David Willaume [plate 5] and the pair of candelabra made in 1744-5 and bearing the mark of John Hugh Le Sage who, like Paul de Lamerie, was a second-generation Huguenot supplier of plate [plate 6]. The candelabra are cast from originals made in the workshop of the French royal goldsmith, Thomas Germain, from the late 1720s onwards. This ‘French School’ in English silver was perhaps the most significant influence on London-made silver during this period and it is interesting to note that works in this style do not always carry Huguenot maker’s marks. French-style silver first appears in court circles with the Restoration and French objects, like the ‘cadinet’ (a receptacle for the monarch’s napkin and flatware), seem to have been popular at the very top of the social scale. The political situation often made direct contact with France difficult and before the arrival of the Huguenots much of the French innovation in both style and technique came by way of German and other continental workers as we have already seen. After the arrival of William and Mary, the Low Countries provided the most convenient conduit for the dissemination of the French style in England. In fact what nowadays is dubbed the ‘William and Mary style’ is purely French, brought to England through the published and practical work of men like the Huguenot Daniel Marot. Marot had trained under Jean Berain and, leaving France at the revocation, he worked in both the Netherlands and England producing thousands of designs in the French neo-classical court style which was described at the time as ‘a la manniere de France’. The octagonal wine cooler well illustrates Marot’s style, although exact copies of French silver articles are in fact not common in English silver. For the most part both English and Huguenot craftsmen worked to adapt French style and ornament on to traditional English forms, like the tankard (unknown in France, even in the beer-drinking areas), the two-handled cup and the monteith. This last object was a circular punch bowl with a notched rim whose origins are explained in an oft-quoted passage in the diary of Anthony à Wood for December 1683: ‘this year in the summer-time came up a vessel or basin notched at the brim to let drinking vessels hang there by the foot, so that the body or drinking place might hang into the water to cool them. Such a basin was called a Monteigh from a fantastical Scot called Monsieur Monteigh who at that time or a little before wore the bottom of his cloake or coat so notched UUUU’. Two monteiths in the Hartman collection well illustrate the contrast between the somewhat naive and often crude ‘English school’ of silversmithing and the ‘French school’ [plates 7 and 8].    The first, with its chased decoration somewhat reminiscent of the auricular style of the Van Vianen family earlier in the century, is made by raising a disc of silver into a hemisphere of quite thin gauge silver. To accomplish this requires great skill on the part of the silversmith; to reinforce the rim and prevent it from splitting, a line of cast ornament and female heads has been added. These are crudely modelled and cast, showing that the journeymen in William Gibson’s workshop had no exposure to the superior techniques appearing in England with the various waves of immigré craftsmen. In time this ‘native’ style died out, superseded by the superior techniques and neo-classical style of the ‘French school’, although awkward two-handled porringers in this style continued to be made in the provinces well into the 18th century. William Gibson’s master, George Garthorne, had been one of the signatories to the petition against ‘aliens and foreigneres’ in 1697 and Gibson’s reluctance to embrace the new trends sweeping his trade perhaps explains why, from 1705 onwards, entries in Gibson’s parish register refer to him as ‘her Majties Lyon Keeper in the Tower’.14 In stark contrast to Gibson’s monteith is an example of 1705-6 which, with its bold architectural mouldings and neo-classical style, is firmly in the new ‘French’ style, owing much to Daniel Marot’s published designs. Interestingly, though, it bears the mark not of a Huguenot, but of Anthony Nelme, who took in a parcel of Lord Sackville’s plate for refashioning in 1705 and was one of the most prosperous of the native silversmiths of this period. Although Nelme was vociferous in his opposition to the ‘necessitous strangers’, it is clear  that like so many of the more successful English suppliers he employed Huguenot and other immigrant journeymen. A third punch bowl [plate 9], which may originally have been fitted with a monteith’s detachable notched rim, is one of the 21 pieces in the Hartman collection struck with the mark of Paul de Lamerie, that most celebrated of craftsmen. If the story of English silver during this period should be viewed in terms of ‘schools’ or styles rather than individual makers, nevertheless Lamerie remains the dominant figure in the trade for nearly 40 years. The scant details of his life are well known, but it is difficult to know what sort of establishment he ran. Unlike George Wickes, he does not appear to have been a fashionable retailer selling work he bought from ‘outworkers’; no trade card of his has come to light, and only two groups of bills, none on printed bill head, have survived in Lamerie’s hand. 15 Yet we know Lamerie had a considerable workshop and during his career took on 13 apprentices. He worked in conjunction with other Huguenots like Paul Crespin, to whom he supplied finished wine coolers that formed part of the extensive service of plate supplied by Crespin to the Jewel House for the Earl of Chesterfield in 1727.16 Additionally, we know that between 1723 and 1728 he was in partnership with an engraver, William Gamble, who seems to have set himself up as a retailer with plush premises, evidently selling Lamerie’s work. 17 After 1728, however, Lamerie and Gamble appear to have separated and in 1732 Gamble was made bankrupt with Lamerie as the petitioning creditor. The wide range of styles represented by the many articles bearing Lamerie’s mark and dating from 1712 to 1751 could not have been made or even designed by one individual and it is clear that he had an extensive workshop. In contrast to the Belton punch bowl, which utilizes mouldings identical to those from the workshop of his master, Pierre Platel, the cake basket from Lamerie’s workshop made in 1739-40 as part of an extensive suite of plate supplied to the 6th Earl of Mountrath [plate 10] shows how Lamerie and his contemporaries adopted the rococo style. The basket, like the magnificent silver-gilt cup and cover supplied in 1737-8 by the Englishman John White to Lord King [plate 11], however, also shows how the rococo was adopted by silversmiths working in London: both objects are essentially baroque forms on to which rococo ornament has been applied. The contrast between them and the pure, restless movement of the pair of candelabra supplied by John le Sage [plate 6], which are as much sculpture as silver articles, is stunning. Only rarely in London-made silver does one find such pure expressions of the rococo. The interchangeability of motifs between objects such as the King cup and cover and work bearing Lamerie’s and others’ marks prompts one to add to the ‘Lamerie group’ other second-generation Huguenots like Lewis Pantin, Paul Crespin and John le Sage, as well as non-Huguenots such as John White and even the German Catholic immigré James Schruder and the Flemish Nicholas Sprimont. Much of the silver bearing the marks of these men has a cohesion of design and form which suggests a great deal of interaction. Given the diverse origins of its members, it also shows how, by the 1740s, the process of assimilation for most of the Huguenot silversmiths was complete. The idea that Huguenot refugees introduced new styles as well as techniques into English silver should also be re-examined. Because silver studies traditionally focused on authorship and the maker’s mark, our perspective of how new styles were adopted has been from the point of view of the supplier rather than the consumer. It has been clear for a number of years that a new approach was required; in most other fields of the decorative arts the study of material culture has been one of patron and supplier. We have seen how there was no single artist supplying silver to a customer; it was the result of a long chain of specialization. Similarly, it was really the patron not the craftsman who was the driving force behind the adoption of new styles (which during the period in question were almost unfailingly French). The international cultural elite who were free to travel were exposed to innovation not only in design but also in food and table decoration. Changes in eating habits meant that silver assumed a new importance as table decoration, replacing the elaborately decorated pies and other dishes that had been the hallmark of medieval cookery. New trends in dining, which had come to France from Italy and Spain through royal marriages, were in turn disseminated throughout Europe in royal and noble households, ultimately passing down to the bourgeoisie and those whom Daniel Defoe dubbed ‘the middling sort’. New dishes like oille, a rich stew of game and meat, and fricassees and ragouts, required new types of silverware like covered tureens, while the move towards smaller, more intimate dinner parties which dispensed with the battalions of servants required for medieval banquets, meant that more silverware like cruet stands and sauce boats needed to be placed on the table. There under the eye of one’s guest, they were required to be of the latest, usually French, style. Similarly, one’s silverware on the tea table was expected to be of ‘taste’. As the consumer base for silver broadened, so the demand for silverware increased. The true legacy of the Huguenots was in providing a skilled and willing body of workers who gave a new life to silver manufacturing in England. In doing this, however, they were responding to consumer demand, exemplified during the period as an insatiable demand for all things French. As Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1739, ‘The English are usually Boobies; they lack the free and easy, yet polished manners of the French. Therefore take note of the French and imitate them ...’18 No wonder Chesterfield felt at home in le quartier des Grecs.

Notes 1 Christopher Hartop, The Huguenot Legacy: English Silver 1680-1760 from the Alan and Simone Hartman Collection, introduction by Ellenor Alcorn, published by Thomas Heneage & Co. Ltd. Distributed by John Adamson. Back to main text 2 Susan Hare, ‘Paul de Lamerie, a retrospective assessment’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, XXV, no. 3, 1991, p. 228. Back to main text 3 The Court Society, 1983, pp. 53, 63. Back to main text 4 The Edwardians, 1983. Back to main text 5 Susan Hare, ‘Paul de Lamerie, 1688-1751’ in Paul de Lamerie: the Work of England’s Master Silversmith, exh. cat., Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, 1990, p. 9. Back to main text 6 Published as The Englishness of English Art, 1956. Back to main text 7 Sir Ambrose Heal, The London Goldsmiths, 1200- 1800, 1935, p. 183; intriguingly this mark does not appear on the copper plate of pre-1697 maker’s marks at Goldsmiths’ Hall (I am grateful to David Beasley for this information). Back to main text 8 ‘The advent of the two-handled cup: the Croft Cups’, Proceedings of the Silver Society, vol. II, nos. 11-13, pp. 202-10. Back to main text 9 John Hayward, Huguenot Silver, 1688-1727, 1975, p. 20. Back to main text 10 ‘... the Acompte of John Bowen Gent. Servant to his Grace the Duke of Somerset and Payor and disbursor of soundry Household payments ... for one whole year endes the 29th day of March 1690’, Petworth papers, West Sussex Record Office, 172. I am grateful to the Earl of Egremont for permission to quote from these papers, and to Alison McCann, the Chief Archivist, for her help. Back to main text 11 Sackville Papers, West Kent Archive Office, Maidstone, U269/E79. Back to main text 12 Chapter 14. Back to main text 13 Hugh Tait, ‘London Huguenot Silver’, in Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550-1850, I Scouloudi, ed., 1985, p. 93. Back to main text 14 Arthur Grimwade, London Goldsmiths, 1697-1830, rev. edn., 1990, p. 522. Back to main text 15 These are for a group of plate supplied to George Treby (some of which is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford); the originals are lost but photostatic copies are in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the other group comprises three long bills to Benjamin Mildmay, Earl Fitzwalter, between c. 1725 and 1738, now in the Essex Record Office, Chelmsford, D/DM/A6. Back to main text 16 From this group of ambassadorial plate, a pair of gilt castors, four candlesticks and a pair of soup tureens are in the Hartman collection. The wine coolers, which appeared on the London market in 1988, were purchased by Alan and Simone Hartman but were denied an export licence; subsequently purchased for the nation, they are divided between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Scottish Museum. Back to main text 17 Robert B. Barker, ‘De Lamerie, Gamble and Hogarth’, privately circulated, 1988. Back to main text 18 Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to his son ..., 1774. Back to main text top This article was first published in the Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland, Vol. XXVII No. 1, 1998.

See Christopher Hartop’s book The Huguenot Legacy English Silver 1680-1760

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