pear-shaped and on collet foot, the domed cover with baluster finial, with carved wood handle, engraved with intials 'AR' within the garter motto and below an earl's coronet
22cm high, gross weight 20oz 16dwt, 647gr

Provenance:
Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery and 1st Earl Midlothian (1847-1929) and by descent to his son
Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery and 2nd Earl Midlothian (1882-1974).
Mentmore, The Executors of the 6th Earl of Rosebery and His Family, Sotheby's, House Sale, 27 May 1977, lot 3576, where purchased by the present owner.

Silver from Mentmore (lots 2022-2025)

Mentmore Towers, usually referred to simply by the mononym ‘Mentmore’, is the 19th-century country house built for the Rothschild family in Buckinghamshire in the 1850s to the designs of Sir Joseph Paxton. The house was designed in the so-called ‘Jacobethan’ style for Baron Mayer de Rothschild, from the banking family and a celebrated collector, as a country home but probably as importantly as a gallery for his famous collection of fine and decorative art.

The Baron and Baroness de Rothschild spent over twenty years living in the house surrounded by their celebrated collections until their deaths in 1874 and 1877 respectively. The couple had only one child and so Hannah de Rothschild was to become the richest woman in Britain as her father’s sole heiress, inheriting the house, estates and art collection. Hannah went on to marry, in 1878, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery and 1st Earl of Midlothian, becoming Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery.

The estates thus passed into the family of the Earls of Rosebery, first to Hannah’s son Albert Edward, 6th Earl and then to her grandson Neil, 7th Earl. The family seat of the Earls of Rosebery was traditionally Dalmeny House in West Lothian and so by the 1940s the Mentmore estates had become somewhat redundant and costly to maintain. For this reason much of the land was sold in 1944, though with the house and village retained by the family. This state of affairs was to continue until 1974 when, on the death of the 6th Earl, the executors began to explore the possibilities for the sale of the house and contents, with the hope it could be sold to the nation to be preserved as a heritage property.

It was initially the intention that the contents could be negotiated for sale to the nation in lieu of inheritance tax but this was refused by the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. Later the possible sale of the house and contents to the nation for £2 million was suggested but this too was refused and so, after several years of discussion, Sotheby’s were instructed by the executors to present the collection for auction in May 1977 in what was to be described as ‘The Sale of the Century’. The sale ran for ten days selling everything from the paintings on the walls, the furniture in the grand salons, the silver in the strongroom to the kitchen wares and furniture from the servant’s quarters.