The scallop shape has long been present in the history of English silver, most notably as sugar boxes and as ornament on flagons and standing cups in the late 16th century. The earliest known example of such a shell-shape in use on a basket, on cast dolphin feet, is by Paul de Lamerie, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A later example of 1747 is in the Farrer Collection in The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and was exhibited London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Rococo Art and Design in Hogarth's England, 1984, no. G21, the article which is refernced here, by P. Glanville.
The bread or fruit basket is conceived in the George II 'Modern' fashion, and evokes the triumph of the nature deity Venus, with its antique-fretted shell 'boat' or 'tazza' wreathed by fruits-of-the-sea and raised on a Roman tripod foot of embowed dolphins. It appears to be drawn by one Neptune's 'nereid' mermaids, whose head and bifurcating tail emerge from the wave-scrolled and reeded herm 'handle' that is clasped to the shell by a water-bubbled cartouche. The 1744 London hallmark and the 'PL' mark of Paul de Lamarie (d. 1751) is recorded on a basket of this pattern, but with different fret, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see Y. Hackenbroch, English and other Silver in the Irwin Untermeyer Collection, rev. ed., London, 1969 no, 183; and discussed M. Snodin ed., The Victoria and Albert Museum, Rococo Art and Design in Hogarth's England, 1984 no G21). The London hallmark for 1755/6, together with the mark of Philips Garden is recorded on a similar basket in the Alan and Simone Hartman Collection (C. Hartop, The Huguenot Legacy, London, 1996, no. 51). The marks of Henry Hayens and Philips (or Philip) Garden, 'Goldsmith and Jeweller' of St. Paul's Churchyard, appear on many works similar to Lamarie's, and it has been suggested that they were buyers of Lamerie's 'patterns' sold in 1752 at Mr. Langford's auction upon their maker's death (Hartop ibid p. 52).