American Silver Cann

Object Details

Object Essay

In making canns, silversmiths and their patrons were more concerned with maintaining proper pint and half-pint capacities than with personal artistic expression or ornamental development of the form. The earliest canns were straight-sided; by the 1740s the bulbous form was common throughout the colonies. The curvaceous baluster body and graceful double-scroll handle of this cann admirably combine the precepts of the rococo style with a pre-eminently functional form. The addition of the leafy furl at the top of the handle helps to date this example to about 1770.       

The cann’s maker, Samuel Parmelee, was born in Guilford, Connecticut, the youngest of Joseph and Abigail (Kimberley) Parmelee’s six children. His mother was from New Haven, and it is likely that he trained there, as there were no working silversmiths in Guilford at the time Samuel was ready to begin his apprenticeship. Parmelee returned to Guilford and set up shop about 1756. He married Sarah Bishop (d. 1777) in 1757, and the couple had six children. In 1770, Parmelee was commissioned as Lieutenant in Connecticut’s Seventh Regiment and served with distinction during the Revolution. After the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1780 and had three more children. When he died in 1807, Parmelee’s estate was modest, with only a small group of goldsmithing tools listed.^{1_{Hammerslough 1954, 123–28.}} The fact that no hollowware made by him after the Revolution survives makes it likely that he worked primarily as a jeweler during his later years.

Silver by Parmelee is relatively rare. All in the rococo style, his work includes spoons with shells on the back of the bowls, plain mid-rib spoons, three-legged cream pots, a three-legged salt, several rings, a tortoiseshell and silver snuffbox, and this cann. His most important commission was for a large baptismal basin for the First Congregational Church in Guilford. Several years after that commission he made a plain beaker for the church as well. The most unusual object marked by Parmelee, and his earliest dated piece, is a small pendant with chains, engraved with a cherub’s head, made in 1756. Several of his objects bear beautiful inscriptions that further demonstrate Parmelee’s competence in the art of engraving.^{2_{Bohan and Hammerslough, 62–67; Buhler and Hood, 1: 248–49.}}

Barbara McLean Ward and Jennifer F. Goldsborough

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.