$40 estate sale find by early African-American silversmith sells for $24,000

A unique silver pap boat made by pioneering American silversmith of African descent Peter Bentzon has been sold to an as-yet unnamed “prominent American institution” for $24,000 after being discovered at an estate sale in Minnesota in a $40 box labelled “silverplate.” The young buyer spotted Bentzon’s hallmark and realized he’d hit the estate sale jackpot.

A pap boat is a shallow elongated bowl with a pouring rim on one side that was used to feed babies or sick people with a thin porridge (aka pap). The pap was highly digestible nourishment that could be given to someone who was too young or too ill to chew. The boat-like shape and pouring lip made holding the bowl and feeding easier. This one is less than five inches long and three inches wide. It weighs 69 grams. The flat bottom of the boat is stamped P. BENTZON in capital letters embedded in a rectangle. It dates to between 1810 and 1820.

Peter Bentzon was the only silversmith of African descent working in early America whose silver pieces can be identified by his personal hallmark. He was born on the island of Saint Thomas to a mother of mixed Afro-Caribbean heritage and a white European father believed to have been Norwegian Jacob Bentzon, a lawyer and royal judge advocate on the island. Peter was just eight years old when he was sent to Philadelphia to become an apprentice to a silversmith. He worked there from 1799 to 1806, then moved back to the Caribbean where he opened his own shop in Christiansted, St. Croix. He worked there for 10 years, marrying Rachel de la Motta, a free woman of color from a prominent family and ultimately having seven children.

Bentzon and his family moved back and forth between St. Croix and Philadelphia. He had an active trading business as well as the silversmith shop. He must have passed for white in Philadelphia as the 1820 census listed both him and his mixed wife as white. They last appear on the census in 1850, and there are no records of his death.

Fewer than 30 pieces of Bentzon silver are known to survive today. Most of them are small flatware (teaspoons) or implements like a nutmeg grater that sold for $40,000 at Sotheby’s in 2021. His two largest and most famous pieces are a pair of identical teapots made for Rebecca Dawson, member of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist family, in 1817. One of them is now in the Saint Louis Art Museum; the other in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Even his teaspoons are in museums. The Philadelphia Art Museum has one, and another well-known piece: a footed cup he made in 1841 for Reverend Benjamin Lucock, a presentation gift from the superintendent and teachers of St. John’s Episcopal Church Sunday School in St. Croix.

* This article was originally published here