A set of four Regency Salt Cellars by PAUL STORR

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A set of four Regency Salt Cellars
A set of four Regency Salt Cellars ( England 1813 to 1814 )
PAUL STORR (1792-1838)

Medium

Silver

Dimensions

15.20cm high (  5.98 inches high)

Provenance

PROVENANCE
Harriot, Duchess of St. Albans; by descent to Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Coutts
Peter Guille, New York
Collection of William Randolph Hearst, sale, Parke-Bernet galleries, 5th to 7th January 1939, lot 252
Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 21 June 1984, lot 179
Sale Christie’s, New York, 19 April 2002; collection of Alan and Simone Hartman

Literature

Charles Truman, The Glory of the Goldsmith, Magnificent Gold and Silver from the Al-Tajir Collection, 1989, p. 179
Christopher Hartop, Royal Goldsmiths: The Art of Rundell & Bridge 1797-1843, 2005, p. 151, cat. no. 26, p. 101, fig. 93

Exhibition History

Christie’s, London, 1989, no. 138
Koopman Rare Art, 14th June – 1st July 2005, no. 26

Description / Expertise

The salts are each modelled as a shell, with gilt liner, supported in the outstretched in the arms of two tritons, on a scrolling base of waves. The salts and liners are engraved with the monogram HStA below a ducal coronet. Stamped on the base: RUNDELL BRIDGE ET RUNDELL.
The salts were probably designed and modelled by William Theed and made under the direction of Paul Storr at their workshops in Dean Street. A watercolour design for a comparable salt supported by two tritons on a rocky base, probably by Edward Hodges Baily after a design by William Theed survives in the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum. A comparable set of four silver-gilt salts but with different bases of 1813 are in the Jerome and Rita Gans Collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (Christopher Hartop, A Noble Feast: English Silver from the Jerome and Rita Gans Collection, 2007, p. 81, no. 53).

William Theed R.A. began his career as a modeller working for Wedgwood and went to work for Rundell’s in about 1804. Initially his work would have involved interpreting the designs supplied to the firm by Thomas Stothard R.A. and John Flaxman R.A. When the time that Rundell’s established their workshop in Dean Street it would seem that Theed was given the house next door; he remained in charge of the substantial design studio maintained by the company until his death in 1817.
Harriot Mellon (c.1775-1837) Duchess of St. Albans, described by the Dictionary of National Biography as an actress and a banker, was the illegitimate daughter of a theatrical wardrobe mistress who became an actress. Her contemporary Anne Mathews described her as a ‘young, glowing beauty’ but with an ‘insuperable rusticity of air and manners’. She attracted the attention of the banker Thomas Coutts (1735-1822) with whom she was associated until the death of his wife in 1815 when they were married; he was 79 and she was 37. Despite the disparity in age the marriage seems to have been happy and she was left his partnership in the bank and his entire fortune. She proved herself a good business woman and her fortunes flourished. Despite great hostility from Coutts’s three daughters she provided them each with £10,000 a year. In 1827 she re-married William, 9th Duke of St. Albans; on this occasion she was 49 and he was 26 but again the marriage seems to have been successful. She left the bulk of her £1.8 million fortune to Coutts’s youngest grand-daughter Angela Burdett (1814-1906).
Angela Burdett-Coutts, ‘the richest heiress in all England’ was the greatest philanthropist of the nineteenth century. She was guided by Charles Dickens in her giving and became a benefactor to a wide variety of good causes including the Church of England, schools, scholarships, destitute children particularly in London’s East End, and working mens’ clubs. In 1871 she was given a peerage in her own right in recognition of her work, taking the title Baroness Burdett of Highgate and Brookfield. In 1881 at the age of 66 she married her secretary William Bartlett, thereby sacrificing three fifths of her wealth to her sister. The terms of her legacy had dictated that should she marry a foreigner, Bartlett was an American by birth, she would loose the legacy.
The silver that both these women commissioned represent some of the greatest works of the silversmiths art of the nineteenth century. Many of the pieces made for the Duchess of St. Albans are in the full-blown Regency style and of the finest workmanship; she turned to Rundells for the majority of her purchases.