A Massive Victorian Parcel-Gilt Silver Tankard, R & S Garrard & Co., London, 1845

Great Exhibition, London, 1851 (this piece, or the same model)

Charlotte Gere and John Culme with William Summers, Garrard, The Crown Jewellers for 150 years 1843-1993, 1993, p. 16 (for another identical tankard 1846)

A pair of tankards of this model was a royal commission for the Ascot Trophy in 1844. See Charlotte Gere and John Culme, Garrard The Crown Jewellers for 150 years, 1993, p. 16 where another of 1846 is illustrated with a detail of its cover. A version was also shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Edmund Cotterill, 1795-1860, was head of Garrard’s design department from about 1831 until his death in 1860. He collaborated with Prince Albert on silver groups made by Garrard, op. cit. p 9., in 1842. Garrard’s made the Renaissance style group with the Queen’s favorite dogs, modelled by Edmund Cotterill and designed by Prince Albert, op. cit. p.14. In the same year Cotterill modelled the 8 foot high Eglington Testimonial. Amongst other sculptural presentation pieces are the 1861 Queen’s Cup, a ewer modelled with Sioux Indians hunting bison, made in 1848 and shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the Arab Fountain in 1853, still in the Royal Collection. The Illustrated London News stated “Cotterill deservedly stands at the head of the class of artists who model for silversmiths, and his productions, annually exhibited at Messrs. Garrard, have earned for that house a celebrity which no other can equal” ( Vol. I, 1842, p.73). His name appears prominently on the cover of this tankard . The same magazine writes in 1857 of the Queen’s Cup -another massive tankard with sculptural group, “a fine example of the times when the massive tankard, enriched with some suitable device, was the most distinguished object on the baronial table. This bold and characteristic piece of plate is conceived and executed in the true spirit of that age when, just emerging from Gothic conventionality into the renaissance, we produced that noble and truly English style which culminated in the Elizabethan…. The crowning group, representing the death of the wild boar, is admirably combined with the composition, and is executed with the characteristic spirit and artistic truth which have been so long peculiar to the house of Garrard. The design is by Mr. (Edmund) Cotterill”, The Illustrated London News , 13^th June 1857, p. 571, quoted by John Culme, Nineteenth-Century Silver, 1977, p. 167.