Tankard (missing lid)
George Hanners Sr. may have trained under Boston silversmith Andrew Tyler (1692/93 – 1741), for he witnessed the will of Tyler’s mother in 1716/17. He had artisanal dealings with silversmiths Thomas Mullins (1680 – 1744) and Benjamin Hiller (1687/88 – about 1745) and in 1739 successfully sued Thomas Townsend (1703/4 – 1757) for nonpayment for a ring, tankard, gold, several pounds of allum, and two nests of crucibles. The suit demonstrates Hanners’s ability to produce hollowware and jewelry for others to retail and to provide supplies to fellow craftsmen.
During his short career, spent “at his House at the Dock-Head, Boston,” Hanners produced much hollowware but comparatively little flatware. He fashioned mourning rings, as noted in at least two estate records, for which he may have used the “Deaths head Stamp” listed in the detailed inventory of his tools. Hanners made ecclesiastical silver for Second Church, Boston; First Church, Woburn; and other congregational churches farther afield in Greenland, New Hampshire, and Branford, Connecticut.
Stylistically, this tankard may be the earliest of its type by the smith. The ribbed handle, with its delicate butterlike scroll, was already outdated when Hanners made it after completing his apprenticeship about 1716. Perhaps he had a model to draw upon, since Andrew Tyler, who has been theorized as Hanners’s master, was not known to fashion such intricate handles.
This silver tankard and its related porringer (cat. no. 63) were made for the Rev. Samuel Phillips and his wife, Hannah (White), of Andover, a few years after their marriage in 1711. The two pieces were nearly contemporaneous, as is suggested by the distinctive notations found on each base, possibly in Hanners’s own hand. The scratch weight engraved on the tankard’s base, typically a guide to an object’s original weight, is twelve ounces more than its current weight, proving that the lid was later removed. Despite this lack, the presence of two rare “GH” touches within rectangles, together with a pair of Hanners’s better-known shield marks, make this work an extremely rare and significant document of the silversmith’s skill.
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.
