This is one of the oldest silver teapots in Scotland.This tea-pot, made about 1715-20, is one of the oldest surviving silver tea-pots in Scotland and is one of the largest existing pieces of Banff silver. The quality of this tea-pot illustrates that the Banff silversmiths were capable of producing sophisticated silverware equal to being produced in Edinburgh. From the 1680s to the 1880s there was a succession of twenty-four silversmith working in Banff, who produced a variety of silver goods including mugs and cutlery. As a county town, Banff was the winter residence of the lairds of Banffshire in the early eighteenth century, the social group who would have commissioned such a large piece of silverware. The making of such a style of tea-pot by a Banff silversmith at this time demonstrates that, despite its apparent remote situation on the Moray Firth coast, the town had easy access to the latest fashionable ideas from down south through mercantile shipping links.
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