Teapot

Merchant Thomas Hancock and his wife, Lydia, daughter of bookseller Daniel Henchman, were wealthy Bostonians in the eighteenth century. Much of their silver was probably purchased abroad, but some pieces, such as three elaborate chafing dishes made by Jacob Hurd, were gifts from Lydia’s father prior to her marriage in 1731. At Hancock’s death, he bequeathed two silver cups to the church in Lexington where his father John was minister, and two silver flagons to the Brattle Street Church. The three communion plates that Hancock gave to the Brattle Church in 1764 were made and engraved with the family arms by Minott shortly after he made this teapot.

Hancock’s name and the announcement of his gift are engraved on the teapot, yet the identity of its intended recipient remains uncertain. Family history maintains that the pot was a gift from Hancock to his nephew Ebenezer, who worked for his uncle upon graduation from Harvard College in 1760. That may have been one way in which the elder Hancock occasionally bestowed gifts upon Ebenezer, whose brother John had been adopted at the age of nine into the merchant’s household. The teapot may be the same as one recorded with a value of $15 in the 1819 inventory of Ebenezer Hancock’s estate.

Similar in form, detail, and engraving to the Hancock teapot is a second example made by Minott in 1763 for tutor William Kneeland of Harvard College. The symmetrical arrangement of arms and mantling amid the raffles and offset swags on the Hancock teapot are a somewhat more conservative expression of the Rococo style, which received livelier treatment in the Kneeland example.

This text has been adapted from "Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000," edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W.R. Ward, published in 2008 by the MFA. Complete references can be found in that publication.