Washington Winter Show 2019

59 A Game of Bowls Boy, bring a bowl of China here Fill it with water cool and clear Decanter with Jamaica [rum] right, And spoon of silver, clean and bright, Sugar twice-fin’d in pieces cut, Knife, sieve and glass in order put, Bring forth the fragrant fruit and then We’re happy till the clock strikes ten. 17 So Benjamin Franklin celebrated a 1737 return home to Philadelphia in Poor Richard’s Almanac . His “bowl of china” may have been English or Dutch Delft, salt-glazed stoneware, or English creamware. Although unlikely to be found in the colonies, even the great porcelain factories of Meissen and Sèvres would shortly be making punch bowls, in response to the fashion for the English drink. Somewhat surprisingly, what was least likely to be seen in America was Chinese porcelain. Traders were importing punch bowls from Canton to London as early as 1696, 18 but the porcelain had to go from China to London, and only then on to the North American colonies (and arrive in one piece). So Asian porcelains were rare, particularly inland, with Asian ceramics not recorded in the Connecticut valley until the 1750s. Instead, the 1743/44 inventory of a Delaware shop includes “5 Delph Punch Bowls” and a “Glass punch Bowl & Cover,” 19 while a store in Annapolis, Maryland, offered large and small punch bowls in Delft and lingum vitae (turned wood). In Virginia, an emporium in Colchester (Fairfax County, just south of Mount Vernon) offered punch bowls in white salt-glazed stoneware, tin-glazed earthenware, and porcelain, in sizes of one quart, which seems to have been the average size, plus one and three pint sizes. Nor were they the only game in town; another store in Colchester sold over three times as many punch bowls as teapots in the mid 18th century. Virginia’s enthusiasm for punch, mocked in London a half-century before, was still going strong. The surprising idea of buying punch bowls in quantity comes out of 18th-century accounts. Owners had sized sets, like mixing bowls (which after all they were), and it was evidently a point of polite society to be able to size High-style neoclassicism from London and for Charles Carroll (the Barrister) of Mount Clare, outside Baltimore. Within five years, he would be escorting the last British Royal Governor to his ship, and serving in the Continental Congress. George III silver punch bowl and matching ladle, London, 1771 and circa. Sotheby’s image.