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Fashionable Albany patrons favored the capstan trencher salt for their dining tables in the first half of the 18th century. These individual containers first augmented and then gradually replaced ceremonial standing salts over the course of the 17th century as intimate dining in private rooms supplanted communal meals served in halls with a high table.
Attribution of these pieces to Jabob Gerritse Lansing the elder is traced through their ownership by members of the Egbert and de Forest families, both of whom had distant kinship ties to the Lansing family of silversmiths. The initials on the marked salt may be those of Egbert and Martje Egberts who married about 1680. The unmarked salt descened through the de Forest family to Anna Lansing Waterbury, and other pieces of silver originally owned by the de Forests bear the elder Lansing's mark.
Trencher
Salts
Jacob Gerritse Lansing (1681-1767)
Albany
Silver, 1705-1740
(a) mark: IGL; inscribed M/EE with coat of arms in shield
AIHA Collection : Gift of Marjorie D. Rockwell (Mrs. Richard C.
Rockwell)
(b) unmarked
AIHA Collection: Purchase from Miss Anna Lansing Waterbury, a descendant
of the original owner.
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