A set of 156 silver-gilt dinner plates with shaped gadrooned rims; engraved with the Royal coat of arms with Garter and crown.

George Wickes was appointed goldsmith to Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1735, although there is evidence that he was working for the Prince’s household as early as 1731. At first his work mainly consisted of cleaning and repairing plate rather than supplying new wares. On Frederick’s marriage in 1736, Wickes would have expected a commission for a new dinner service, but the Jewel Office records simply note that the King presented his son with existing plate from the pantries, and reserved any new items for himself. The King’s extreme wariness of the Prince setting himself up as a rival is clear from Lord Egmont’s report of the wedding from his cousin, Moll Dering. Egmont records that on the day of the wedding itself ‘The Prince had designed to eat in a public manner with the Princess in his own apartment, but in the morning the King sent an order that nobody should see him dine’, and the following day ‘The Prince being to dine with the Princess and the Duke and the other Princesses in his own apartment, had ordered an elbow chair only for himself, and so to dine as does the King, but that the King had sent to her to take care that there were seven elbow chairs at the table in order to preserve an equality among them all’.

In the late part of 1737 Wickes did receive a large order from the Prince for a dining service, which in total weighed over 7,710 oz. Frederick’s commission was poorly timed. Almost immediately after the order, he broke with his father and was banished to Kew. The Prince was forced to retrench and Wickes’s ledgers record ‘To the damadge and loss to me in a large parcell of plate bespoke and ordered by the Prince which was in such forwardness when countermand as amounts to more then £500’. But by July 1738 he had been ordered to proceed and a sum of £1,678 12s 5d was paid out by Frederick for what Wickes describes as a ‘large parcell of plate bespoke and ordered by the Prince’. The service included 96 plates, as well as serving dishes and covers, sauceboats, salts, casters, salvers, flatware, candlesticks and sconces.

Text adapted from The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714 - 1760, London, 2014

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The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714-1760: The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace

Dinner plate

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