Porringer

The remarkable survival of this porringer in the Gibbs family adds to our knowledge of not only the possessions of an early and prominent American family but also the occasions they chose for making gifts of silver. The Gibbs family is well known to historians of colonial New England. Henry Gibbs, whose name appears on this porringer, was a minister of First Church, Watertown. He was the son of Boston merchant Robert Gibbs (about 1634 – 1674/75) and the namesake of his paternal grandfather, Sir Henry Gibbs, a knight from Homington, County Warwick, near Stratford on Avon.

Having limited financial prospects as the younger son in his family, Henry Gibbs’s father, Robert, chose to establish himself in New England. He married Elizabeth Sheafe (1644 – 1718) of Cambridge, whose inheritance from her grandfather Henry Webb (d. 1660) was substantial. The couple built an impressive stone residence in Boston valued at £3,000 by John Josselyn, author of New England’s Rareties Discovered (1672). It is likely that the mansion was graced with portraits by the Freake-Gibbs painter of Gibbs’s children Margaret, Robert, and Henry. The children’s gentrified dress was no doubt intended to demonstrate their wealth and elevated social status, as was the silver that Robert received from his father in England. His wife, Elizabeth, who later married Jonathan Corwin (also spelled Curwen and Curwin) of Salem upon Robert’s death, enumerated many of these objects in her will of 1717. To their son Henry she gave a “Grate Silver Tankard which his Grandfather Sir Henry Gibbs sent me as a present also my Grate Silver Salt seller,” and to Henry’s daughter Margaret (1699 – 1771) she gave a “silver mustard pott & a silver knob’d spoon.”

The porringer’s engraving suggests that it was given by Henry Gibbs to his daughter Margaret either on her marriage to Rev. Nathaniel Appleton in 1719 or for the birth in 1720 of her daughter and namesake, Margaret. The Gibbs tradition of inscribing silver with the names or initials of donor and recipient is also recorded on an Edward Webb tankard that was given by Henry’s mother, Elizabeth, to her granddaughter Mary Gibbs sometime after the latter’s birth in 1699. The couple also owned a pepper box and chafing dish by John Coney, the former received by inheritance.

The crest displayed on the porringer handle is probably a variant of one found on the tombstone carved for Samuel Appleton (1653 – 1725) of Ipswich.

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.