THE PROVENANCE
The elegant urns are engraved with the arms of Milnes with Busk in pretense, born by James Milnes (d.1805), of Thornes House, Yorkshire, who married Mary Busk, in 1778. Milnes was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, also James Milnes, of Brinsop Hall, Lancaster; Mary, was the daughter and co-heir of an equally successful wool merchant from Leeds. A month after their marriage, they purchased their first parcel of land near Wakefield and in the following years (1779-1791), built Thornes House, an elegant mansion with fine views, designed by the celebrated local architect John Carr. Intriguingly, little is known about the house, however an elevation and floor plan of the principal story were engraved by George Richardson, London, in 1800. The dining room adjoining the central bowed drawing room (‘executed in the modern taste by Mr Carr of York’), clearly shows a recessed alcove where a serving table and this pair of pedestals would have been placed. Top artisans must have been employed, as the drawing room and library chimneypieces were embellished with jasper plaques by the leading ceramicist, Josiah Wedgwood.
Milnes and his wife each came into vast fortunes upon the death of their respective fathers in 1792. This money allowed for many luxuries, notably the purchase of Piccadilly London mansion, Egremont House, where they hosted a dinner for 200 on the occasion of the King’s birthday in 1801. When Milnes died in 1805, his obituary lauded his ‘urbanity of manners and inflexible integrity in public and private life’ (Gentleman’s Magazine). As he died without issue, the estate was bequeathed to his cousin, Benjamin Gaskell, Esq. of Clifton Hall, near Manchester, and the estate descended in the Milnes-Gaskell family. In 1924, it became a grammer school. A full discourse on the house and family was delivered by John Goodchild, 'James Milnes: An Eighteenth Century Wakefield Merchant Prince’ (Wakefield Historic Society Journal, Vol. 10, 1983).

POTENTIAL MAKERS
The silver-plated urns are likely to be the work of fashionable silversmith, ormolu and blue-john manufacturer Matthew Boulton (d. 1809) of Birmingham. A closely related design from Boulton and Fothergill’s Pattern Books is reproduced in E. Delieb and M. Roberts, Matthew Boulton Master Silversmith 1760-1790, 1971, p. 133 (top center) while Boulton’s personal tea vase with the family’s coat of arms also bears comparison (S. Mason, ed., Matthew Boulton: Selling what all the world desires, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 155, pl.114).
The exceptional quality of pedestals – highly figured satinwood, silver-plated mounts and finely detailed painting – suggests the production of a top London cabinet-maker, probably in collaboration with Boulton whose name is linked with two potential makers of note. One of these is the pre-eminent partnership of Ince and Mayhew, with whom there was considerable interaction and correspondence. One interesting letter to Mayhew of around 1776 concerns the supply of ‘plated ornaments to [a] Cistern’ (L. Boynton, ed. 'An Ince and Mayhew Correspondence’, Furniture History, 1966, pp. 23-36), and the handles are a pattern used by Mayhew. George Seddon is another candidate. Boulton's intriguing 1782 letter to Seddon concerns the potential supply of paintings to embellish a cabinet which he considered ‘best upon Copper, and if so, the pieces Shod be thin and smooth, made to fit the things they are intended to ornament’ (L. Boynton, op. cit., p. 23). The likelihood of Boulton’s collaboration in the making of the pedestals is strengthened by this venture into ‘mechanical paintings’. Angelica Kauffmann supplied two oval pictures depicting similar classical figures that were copied by Boulton, and placed in his frames. These are probably those referenced by Kauffmann in 1778 (N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, London, 2002, pp. 267-269, pl. 225).
Boulton was a friend of Wedgwood’s, who supplied the Thornes House chimneys, and fellow member of the exclusive Lunar Society, whose pioneering members are thought to have been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. Mayhew also worked with Wedgwood.