Case 11 2010-11 : The great silver wine cistern of Thomas Wentworth Expert Adviser’s Statement Reviewing Committee Secretary’s note: Please note that the illustrations referred to have not been reproduced on the MLA website EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. Brief Description of item The great oval silver wine cistern of Thomas Wentworth, 3 rd Baron Raby (1672- 1739), Ambassador Extraordinary to Berlin, 1706-1711, Philip Rollos senior, London, 1705-06. Engraved with contemporary royal arms and cipher of Queen Anne (the engraving attributed to John Rollos) with applied lobes and strapwork, demi lion and drop ring handles and lip border of shells, fully hallmarked on the underside, with maker’s mark (Grimwade no. 2383) and Britannia mark on the handles, the foot reinforced on the underside with riveted brass straps. Height 83 cm.; 32 inches; width 129.5 cm; 51 inches; depth 83 cm.; 32 inches. Weight 908000 gr; 2597 oz 15 dwt 2. Context Thomas Wentworth, 3 rd Baron Raby (created Earl of Strafford, 1711) ambassador extraordinary to the King of Prussia at Berlin, 1706-1711, and thence by descent through his eldest daughter Lady Anne Conolly, to her granddaughter Lady Amelia Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry, Viscountess Castlereagh (d.1829); believed to have passed during her lifetime to her father John Hobart, 2 nd Earl of Buckinghamshire (d.1793) of Blickling Hall, Norfolk; and then in turn to his eldest daughter Caroline Harbord, Baroness Suffield; and to her great nephew William Kerr, 8th Marquis of Lothian and thence by descent. Key literature : Treasures: Aristocratic Heirlooms , Sotheby’s, London 6 July 2010, VIII, pp.70-83 Helen Jacobsen, ‘Ambassadorial plate of the later Stuart period and the collection of the Earl of Strafford’, Journal of the History of Collections , vol. 19, no.1 (2007) James Lomax, ‘Royalty and silver: The role of the Jewel House in the eighteenth century’, The Silver Society Journal , vol.11 (Autumn 1999),pp.133-139. John Harris, Bodt and Stainborough, The Architectural Review , July 1961,pp.34-35 N.M.Penzer, ‘The Great Wine Coolers’ Parts I & II, Apollo , August- September, 1957 James Salzmann, ‘Deliv’d for the use of his Lordship’s table’: British Ambassadorial Silver from William and Mary to George IV: MA Thesis, Sotheby’s Institute, London, 2007. The Strafford Papers, British Library Additional MS 22226 3. Waverley criteria The cistern fulfils criteria one, two and three, being of outstanding importance for British heritage reflecting the status of an early 18 th century British ambassador to Berlin and The Hague as Queen Anne’s representative; being of the highest aesthetic quality both in design, proportion and in the execution of the cast figurative elements and contemporary engraving and of importance to the study of the manufacture and production of large-scale silver, and its symbolic purpose as reflecting official and personal status and its practical function in chilling and serving wine. The re-emergence of this cistern after an interlude of three hundred years and the remarkable survival of correspondence between Lord and Lady Strafford in the British Library about their allocation of ambassadorial plate, coupled with the evidence of the official Jewel House accounts in the National Archives, make this the best documented example as well as the largest surviving piece of ambassadorial plate in this country. DETAILED CASE 1. Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive summary, and any comments. Description Britannia silver. The oval wine cistern is supported on a concave-convex base beaten from a single sheet of silver but with a separate foot. The convex section of the base is decorated with applied cast lambrequins which are soldered and riveted to the base. The upper bowl section is raised from one huge sheet of silver and the lower concave section is also decorated with larger cast lambrequin lobes soldered and riveted in place. The bowl is reinforced at the waist with an applied reeded moulding. The outcurving cast rim is decorated with applied shells which are also riveted and soldered to the rim. The handles are hinged to scrolling brackets in the form of lions’ heads and are cast in several sections. The front of the cistern is engraved with the shield containing the Royal Arms of Queen Anne and supporters, the lion and unicorn and the intials AR. The cistern is an astonishing 129 cm. wide and its height is equal to its depth at 83 cm. It weighs 2597 oz 15 dwts. There is a complete set of marks on the underside – lion’s head, date letter for 1705- 6, Britannia (alloy-standard) mark and the maker’s mark of Philip Rollos senior (Grimwade no. 2383). The maker’s mark and Britannia mark are also struck on both the lions’ head handles. The Makers Philip Rollos, senior was one of the finest immigrant goldsmiths working in London in the late 17 th and early 18 th centuries. He is first recorded in London when he took up denization in 1691 and he entered his maker’s mark (RO) at Goldsmiths Hall in 1697 giving his address as ‘over against Bull Inn Court, Strand’, a thoroughfare running north from the Strand to Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. Rollos became member of Livery of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1698 and held the appointment of subordinate goldsmith to the Jewel Office under William III and Queen Anne. He appears to have handed over the business to his sons between 1703 and 1705 and retired to Wandsworth where he was living at the time of his death in 1711. Recent research has established that Philip Rollos senior had close links with Berlin, and that he was probably of German Lutheran origin rather than a member of the London Huguenot community as has hitherto been assumed but never proven. His will, written in April 1711, six months before his death, mentions his three sons, Philip, John and Jacob and names his wife Mary as his executrix. His daughter is not named but was married to Esdras Marcus Lightenstone, Minister of the Gospel at Aurich, East Freizland, who had died before the will was written. Philip Rollos senior leaves his property in the Domstras, Berlin, to his grandson Gustav Philip Lightenstone, indicating that the Rollos family probably came to London from Berlin. John Culme has demonstrated in his ground-breaking entry for Sotheby’s recent catalogue that there were engravers and jewellers with the family name Rollos in Berlin in the 17 th century. Philip Rollos junior was apprenticed to the London goldsmith Dallington Ayres in 1692, but turned over to his father. He achieved freedom of the Goldsmiths’ Company in July 1705. It is likely that he assisted his father in the production of this cistern as he took over the family business when his father retired to Wandsworth at about this time. Like his father, Philip Rollos junior also held the role of Subordinate Goldsmith to the Crown. His brother, John Rollos, described himself as an engraver when he bound his son Christian apprentice to Philip Rollos junior in December 1721. John Rollos specialized in engraving seals and stamps and was paid in October 1707 by the Stamp Office, where he maintained his connections up to his death in 1743. His name appears to have been misunderstood as John Roos in the records of the Royal Mint from 1704-1720; as he is recorded as seal engraver for the Crown in a portrait sketch by Marcellus Laroon dated 1718 inscribed ‘Mr.Rolus his Majestys Engraver of ye broad seal ‘(now in the British Museum, but formerly in the collection of Horace Walpole). His fellow engraver and antiquary, George Vertue, noted that John Rollos left a legacy of some £200 to his family. Number of comparable items already in the UK The term cistern has hitherto been used to describe both the larger wine coolers used for chilling bottles of wine as well as the smaller containers, referred to in early 18 th century accounts as ‘washers’ , used to catch the drips from rinsing glasses in the water from the ‘wine’ fountain positioned above. Although there are over sixteen smaller wine cisterns (‘washers’) still in British Collections, there are only eight other recorded surviving larger silver cisterns in this country which were intended for cooling wine bottles in the Dining Room. There were three generations of production before smaller wine coolers, intended for a single bottle, became more fashionable as they were easier to accommodate. These single bottle coolers were introduced in France in the late 17 th century and the earliest London-made examples date from 1698. The earliest smaller cisterns were made by London goldsmiths some with as yet unidentified maker’s marks and range in date from 1667 to 1680, from the first twenty years of the reign of Charles II. The earliest of the larger cisterns, at Belvoir Castle, was made in 1681 and bears the mark of the London goldsmith Robert Cooper (Appendix no.1). Others by Charles Shelley, 1682, at Welbeck (no.II and Benjamin Bathurst, 1695, for the Earl of Jersey (figure 1, no.III), reflect the standing of their patrons in court circles and in Lord Jersey’s case, his diplomatic status. The second generation of large wine cisterns dating from 1701-1729 is dominated by those produced by the two generations of the Rollos workshop and by leading Huguenot goldsmiths Peter Archambo, Pierre Harache and David Willaume. Native goldsmiths imitated these designs and recorded smaller examples are marked by Ralph Leake, George Garthorne, William Lukin and Anthony Nelme. Of this second generation, the Raby cistern is the second largest to survive; it is significant that the two largest examples were marked by the Rollos workshop.