Elizabethan or Jacobean silver goblet fashioned from a coconut shell, £5500 at Woolley & Wallis.
A good example standing 7in (18cm) high was offered in the Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) Silver & Objects of Vertu auction on January 24-25
Unmarked but from c.1600-20, the 7in (18cm) vessel with engraved foliate silver rim and strap supports is later inscribed RMM September 14 1726. It was estimated at £2000- 3000 and sold at £5500.
Wanli tea bowl
Pieces of Chinese porcelain mounted in silver and gold in the 16th century are a rarer breed, but one comes up for sale at Chiswick Auctions on March 23. The previously unrecorded goblet is expected to sell for £6000-8000.
Standing 5in (13cm) high, it combines a Kraak blue and white tea bowl from the reign of the Wanli emperor (1573-1620) with a strapwork and openwork silver mount of a type that was fashionable from c.1580-1600. Unmarked, it probably post-dates by a decade or so the earliest dated piece of English silver-mounted Chinese porcelain (the Lennard Cup of 1569 in the British Museum).
Elizabethan silver goblet fashioned from a Wanli porcelain tea bowl, estimate £6000-8000 at Chiswick Auctions.
Chiswick’s silver specialist John Rogers had been excited to receive an image of the diminutive goblet via email and confirmed the discovery following a visit to the seller’s home in nearby Hammersmith in west London the next. The full history of the piece is unknown. However, it comes by descent from Arthur Abraham Clifford De Pinna (1889- 1947), a ‘second-hand’ furniture dealer in Piccadilly whose cousin was the oriental porcelain specialist Alfred Samson de Pinna (1868-1963).
