About This Artwork

Benjamin Burt
American, 1729-1805

Communion Dish, 1781

Silver
33.2 x 3.8 cm (13 1/16 x 1 1/2 in.)
Marked near center on underside of bowl: "B.BURT" (in rectangle); engraved around rim of dish: a cherub's head and the words "The Legacy of the Honble ISAAC ROYALL ESQ. to the CHURCH OF CHRIST in Medford 1781."
Gift of the Antiquarian Society, 1989.65

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, American Church Silver of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries with a Few Pieces of Domestic Plate, July–Dec. 1911, cat. 109.

Art Institute of Chicago, Spiritual Expressions: Art for Private Contemplation and Public Celebration, Nov. 22, 1995–Mar. 17, 1996, no cat.

Publication History

E. Alfred Jones, The Old Silver of American Churches (Letchworth, England, National Society of Colonial Dames of America/Arden Press, 1913), p. 275, pl. 89.

Gladys N. Hoover, The Elegant Royalls of Colonial New England (Vantage, 1974), p. 101.

Judith A. Barter et al, American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), pp. 75-76, no. 19.

Ownership History

Commissioned by the First Church of Christ, Medford, Mass. from a bequest of Isaac Royall, Medford, Mass.,1781; Firestone and Parson Jewelers, Ritz–Carton Hotel, Boston, by 1987; Marshall Field, Chicago, 1988; sold to The Art Institute of Chicago, 1989.