ABSTRACT
In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there is a silver presentation cup made by a man named Peter Bentzon (Figure 6.1). It is small, with a handle on one side and takes the form of three solid sections: a hollowed flattened jug attached to a curved fount mounted on an hourglass base. It is a beautiful object, but perhaps no more or less than the objects that surround it: another example of late-eighteenth-century American decorative arts. It is here that the picture becomes somewhat more complicated, because in reading the label and you find that Bentzon, a man of mixed parentage (a “mustice”)—he had a mulatto mother and a white father—was from St Thomas, in the Caribbean, born into freedom around 1783. 1 He learned his trade in both St Croix and Philadelphia and although his work is categorized as American, and African American, his life reflects the circuits of travel and trade that connected the Caribbean and the cities of North America. Peter Bentzon (b. ca. 1783–d. after 1850), <italic>Footed Cup</italic>, 1841. Silver, 17.5 × 13.7 × 10.2 cm; weight: 15 ounces; 17.5 dwt. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund and with the partial gift of Wynard Wilkinson. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351045193/084af8ac-cbf0-4200-b985-a4b4331aa8e7/content/fig6_1_B.jpg"/>
