This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (September 2022) |
Joseph Foster (September 10, 1759 - December 27, 1839) was an American silversmith, active in Boston.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Pair_of_covered_standing_cups%2C_Joseph_Foster%2C_Boston%2C_c._1790%2C_silver_-_Currier_Museum_of_Art_-_Manchester%2C_NH_-_DSC07936.jpg/220px-Pair_of_covered_standing_cups%2C_Joseph_Foster%2C_Boston%2C_c._1790%2C_silver_-_Currier_Museum_of_Art_-_Manchester%2C_NH_-_DSC07936.jpg)
Foster was born in either Boston or Ware, Massachusetts. From 1774 to 1781 he was apprenticed to Benjamin Burt in Boston. They remained close throughout Burt's life; Foster was sole executor of Burt's estate in 1805, and Burt's will left ". . . to my trusty friend Joseph Foster of Boston, Goldsmith one hundred dollars." He worked circa 1781-1830 as a silversmith in Boston, with a shop on Ann Street and later on Fish Street near Burt. Foster was recalled by Colonel Henry Lee in 1881 as follows: "An anxious visit of inquiry to 'honest Foster', the silversmith, who, in his long coat, knee-breeches and silver buckles, dwelt with his spinster sister in an impracticably low-jettied house, one step below the narrow sidewalk, and, as old-fashioned housekeepers believed, beat his silver to a superior whiteness".
Foster's mark appears on a considerable quantity of Boston-area church plate. His work is collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Yale University Art Gallery.
References
edit- "Joseph Foster", American Silversmiths (Ware birth).
- "Joseph Foster", American Silversmiths (Boston birth).
- Early American Silver in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Carver Wees, Medill Higgins Harvey, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013, page 30.
- American Church Silver of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: With a Few Pieces of Domestic Plate, Exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, July to December, 1911, Museum of Fine Arts, 1911, pages 57-58.
- American Silversmiths and Their Marks: The Definitive (1948) Edition, Stephen Guernsey Cook Ensko, Courier Corporation, 1983, page 193.
- Sterling Flatware Fashions
- Ware Vital Records