A tankard by Myer Myers.(silverwares)

Myer Myers operated the most prolific silversmith's shop in New York during the third quarter of the eighteenth century and marked many of the finest American-made objects in the rococo style. He was also exceptional as the first native English Jew in the British Empire to complete a formal apprenticeship and establish himself as a retail silversmith since the founding of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in 1327, a circumstance made possible by the less restricted environment in colonies such as New York. His life and career have received considerable scholarly attention: a major monographic exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1954 featured 172 objects and coincided with publication of Myer Myers, Goldsmith: 172301795 by Jeanette W. Rosenbaum with contributions by Kathryn C. Buhler of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2001 I organized a traveling exhibition entitled Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York for the Yale University Art Gallery and co-authored the accompanying catalogues, which include 104 objects by Myers. (1)

On a recent visit to the Maryland Historical Society, deputy director Mark B. Letzer showed me a tankard by Myers that was donated to the collection in 1959 but had escaped the notice of previous researchers (Fig. 1). The mirror cipher monogram on the lid (Fig. la) and a monogram (Fig. 2) and name subsequently engraved on the side and bottom, respectively, suggested to me chat it might be possible to trace its history of ownership. In fact, it turns out to have a distinguished provenance that adds to our understanding of Myers's career as well as the lives of his fellow Jews in colonial America.

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Large silver tankards like this one, with a capacity of approximately one quart, were communal drinking vessels used in England and its colonies from the fourteenth until the beginning of the nineteenth century. (2) Myers's tankard has the broad proportions, flat cover, and un-molded body characteristic of New York tankards from the first half of the eighteenth century. In almost every detail it is identical to two other early Myers tankards: one made for Ennis and Sarah (Man) Graham of New York prior to Sarah's death in 1763 and another, without provenance, in the Yale University Art Gallery (Fig. 4.). The Maryland Historical Society's tankard is struck with a mark Myers used on documented objects dating from the 1750s and early 1760s (Fig. 3), while the mirror cipher monogram on the cover (Fig. 1a) resembles one on a waiter he made for David and Margaret (Evans) Franks of Philadelphia between 1746 and 1755. (3)

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The monogram on the tankard's lid is composed of the letters "JBS," for Joseph Solomon and his wife, Bilah Myers-Cohen. On the side is the monogram "ECC" for their great-great-grandson Edward Cohen and his wife, Caroline Myers, who were married in 1865. The tankard may well have been presented to them because Caroline was the silversmith's great-granddaughter. A childless couple, Edward and Caroline Cohen gave it to their niece Eleanor Septima Cohen, who was the recipient of many extraordinary family heirlooms, particularly from her Etting ancestors in Baltimore, which she donated to the Maryland Historical Society. However, presumably because the tankards early history did not relate to Maryland, she gave it to an executor of her estate, Dr. Julius Friedenwald, whose wife in turn presented it to Mary Washington Thom. Mrs. Thom gave it to the historical society in 1959, "to go back among her [Eleanor Cohen's] many treasures." (4)