Cup and Cover, 1632 [Si009]
London, 1632; maker’s mark: PG above a rosette (probably Peter Guy, d. 1645?)
Silver gilt: H. 37.2 cm, D. 14.6 cm, 885 g
Inscribed on the lip: Ex dono Hugonis Barker legu[m] Doctoris olim huius Collegii / Scholaris ac Consanguinei fundatoris eiusdem Collegii / ac eo nomine in numeru[m] Scholariu[m] eiusdem admissi
[From the gift of Hugh Barker, Doctor of Laws, formerly a Scholar of this College and a kinsman of the Founder of that same College, and by that name admitted to the number of Scholars of the same]
In a circle, below the inscription, the arms of Barker with crest and mantling; on the opposite side, the arms of Wykeham.
This cup is of some significance as the earliest piece of English silver where matted decoration is used over much of the exterior as the main form of ornamentation. Mitchell (Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London) lists six pieces with this maker’s mark, not including the present piece, dating from 1632/3 to 1641/2. It almost certainly is that of Peter Guy, who was apprenticed to a Richard Blackwell from 1607 to 1614. In the 1630s he was commissioned by the Goldsmiths’ Company to make two large salts with covers.
The donor, Hugh Barker DCL (1564-1632) was a Founder’s Kin Scholar (elected 1577); Fellow of New College (1585-91); Master of Chichester Grammar School (1604); Chancellor of the Diocese of Oxford; Fellow of the College of Advocates; Dean of the Court of Arches. The Donor’s father, Robert Barker, married Mary, daughter of William Danvers, of Culworth, Northants, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Fiennes, de jure 4th Lord Saye and Sele, who claimed kinship with the founder, as a descendent of his sister, Agnes.
Literature: Percy MacQuoid, ‘The Plate of Winchester College’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 2, no. 5 (July 1903), p. 161, plate IVb; Charles James Jackson, An Illustrated History of English Plate (2 vols, 1911), pp. 672-3 (illustrated); Charles Oman, ‘The Winchester College Plate’, The Connoisseur (January, 1962), p. 29, illustrated; Charles Oman, Caroline Silver, 1625-1688 (London, 1970), pp. 15, 38, plate 1A; Hugh Tait, ‘The Advent of the Two-handed Cup’, The Proceedings of the Society of Silver Collectors, 1976-79, Vol. II, no. 12, p. 207; Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1990), p. 246; Ellenor M. Alcorn, English Silver in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2 vols (Boston, 1993), vol 1, p. 106, n.2; R. Foster, Winchester College Treasury: a guide to the collections (Winchester, 2016), p. 21 (illustrated).
Provenance: Acquired by the College from the bequest of Hugh Barker (d. 1632).
Location: Treasury, Gallery 1.
