Chapter 11

Author: Gerald Ward

Title: Silver Chocolate Pots of Colonial Boston.

Despite their low numbers, the Boston silver chocolate pots—especially the six made before
1720 by John Coney, Edward Winslow, Edward Webb, and Peter Oliver—provide a glimpse of life in Boston during a period of florescence in the decorative arts. Extraordinarily stylish and costly, the pots were faddish in their response to a new custom. Used in the process of consuming a luxurious beverage in a custom that migrated from Catholic Spain and southern Europe, silver chocolate pots seem almost antithetical in Protestant Boston, yet their existence--when taken into account with other stylish forms of silver, furniture, and architecture---is a small slice of material evidence of the changes, ultimately dramatic in their extent, that were moving Boston from its origins as a Puritan enclave in the seventeenth century to its place as a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, commercial colonial city in the very earliest years of the eighteenth century. This essay examines from a variety of viewpoints the rare surviving group of silver chocolate pots made in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Boston by Coney, Winslow, Oliver, and Webb, as well as two later examples by Zachariah Brigden. The overriding goals were to examine this body of objects from an art historical point of view, looking at their stylistic sources and success as objects, but also as documents of the novel practice of drinking chocolate amongst Boston's socio-economic elite at that time. I attempt to link this custom to an efflorescence in Boston's architectural, material, and cultural life that occurred due to an influx of royal officials and administrators starting in the early 1690s, bringing with them a taste for new building types, furniture forms, and silver objects, such as the related group of ten Boston silver sugar boxes, in addition to the chocolate.

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