Sugar Urn and Cover,

ca. 1790

Although Elias Boudinot III was an accomplished silversmith in Philadelphia before moving his family to Princeton in the 1750s, his output was small, and no work by him is included in the Boudinot Collection. His son, Elias IV, whose portrait hangs nearby, later served as director of the United States Mint, engaging, like his father, in the transformation of rare metals into objects of value. The younger Boudinot hired silversmith Joseph Richardson Jr., who made this sugar urn, to be the mint’s assayer, underscoring the role of silver as a material of both aesthetic and economic value. Richardson’s urn was completed around 1790 in the neoclassical style. Its chaste, geometric forms are also evident in the contemporary tea set by Alexander Gordon, in comparison with the more organically robust decoration of the earlier pieces on display.