With its elegantly curved spout, detailed engravings, and pine cone-shaped ornamental lid topper, a 250-year-old sterling silver coffeepot sold earlier this year for nearly half a mil at Sotheby's, thanks to one six-letter word near the top of the artifact: "Revere." Now, the rare silver treasure—believed to have been crafted by none other than Paul Revere, who famously rode on horseback during the Revolutionary War to warn locals in Massachusetts that British soldiers were on their way—is on sale once again, this time for nearly $1.3 million.
The coffeepot was made sometime around 1775, around the same time as Revere's famous ride, for a Newburyport doctor named Micajah Sawyer. In addition to his more patriotic duties, Revere was an accomplished silversmith whose father had also been a silversmith, and "the only person in all of the Americas that could take a piece of silver from a silver ingot and make it into a finished product," Bill Rau of antiques dealer MS Rau tells the Washington Post. "There was nobody else with that skill in all of the Americas."
The coffeepot remained with the Sawyer family for more than 200 years, then ended up in the hands of a collector who lent it to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, where it stayed until 2014, when the collector died. Antiques house MS Rau, which acquired the coffeepot from an unidentified person who bought it at the Sotheby's auction in January for $440,000, is now trying to sell the piece for $1,285,000. "In terms of maker, quality, and provenance, this coffeepot is the most significant American silver object available today," reads MS Rau's description of its 42-ounce "extraordinary treasure." (More Paul Revere stories.)
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