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Philip Garden

Philip Garden son of John Garden late Citizen and Draper of London deceased, apprenticed to Gawen Nash 4 February 1730 on payment of £5 of the charity of Christ's Hospital London. Free, 3 October 1738. Mark entered as smallworker, 12 June 1738. Address: Gutter Lane. 'Free of Goldsmiths'. Second mark as largeworker, 23 June 1739. Third, 12 March 1744. Address: St. Paul's Churchyard. Livery, September 1746. Fourth mark, 29 October 1748. Fifth, 18 April 1751. Heal records him as Phillips Garden, working goldsmith and jeweller, Gutter Lane, 1739; and at the Golden Lion, North side of St. Paul's Churchyard, 1739-1762 when bankrupt, and states he was succeeded by John Townsend in the latter year. Resigned from Livery, 9 December 1763. Phillips Garden, goldsmith Marylebone, appears in the Parl. Report List 1773. Henry Garden, son of Phillip Garden, goldsmith of St.Paul's Churchyard was admitted to St.Paul's School (almost alongside his father's shop), 7 April 1749, aged nine. At his best Garden is an admirable exponent of the rococo style. There has always been believed that there was a connection between the silversmiths Philip Garden and Paul de Lamerie. It has been suggested that Garden purchased the tools and models from de Lamerie’s workshop when he died in 1751 (E. M. Alcorn, English Silver in The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, vol. 2, 2000, p. 177). Just three years before his death, de Lamerie made a coffee pot with a short spout, cast with coffee leaves and blossoms upon a matted ground above a shell (George Sidney, Beverley Hills, California; Christie’s, New York, 24 May 1977, lot 231). A coffeepot by Garden and marked for 1752 has the identical spout to the Lamerie example, substantiating the belief that Garden was working from de Lamerie’s models.