An English way with tea: Silver containers of the eighteenth century, continued.

The tea containers illustrated and discussed in my article in the June 2007 issue of this magazine are part of a dense and colorful exhibit at Colonial Williamsburg's DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. (1) But they tell only part of the story of this functional form, bringing us barely into the third quarter of the eighteenth century. They represent what I identified in that article as the novelty and development stages in the evolution of a silver form. The examples that follow represent what turns out to be another predictable change in this evolution--a stage I call custom, when the form has been established and accepted and begins to be ...