This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 2 December 1771, Ireland
Died: 17 April 1845
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Jane Terry
Williams, Jane (1771–1845), silversmith, was born 2 December 1771 in Cork, the eldest of seven daughters and two sons born to Carden Terry , silversmith, and his wife Catherine (née Webb), daughter of Stonewell Webb, also a silversmith. Carden was born 1742 to John Terry, a burgess of Cork, and his wife Sarah (née Carden). The Terrys were a prominent political and mercantile family in Cork; Carden, made a freeman of the city in 1785, was foremost in efforts to establish an assay office in the county. Since the introduction of legislation in 1784, the fifty or so gold and silversmiths active in Cork were required to register with the Company of Goldsmiths of Dublin, and have their work assayed and stamped there, an expensive and time consuming imposition.
Carden took his apprentice, John Williams, into partnership in 1795. Williams had married Jane on 6 August 1791 at St Peter’s Church, Cork. John died in 1806, leaving Jane to raise their five sons and two daughters, and as a result, Carden Terry took his daughter into partnership at the firm’s premises at 44 Grand Parade. Terry struck a new maker’s mark in 1807, incorporating ‘J. W.’, his daughter’s initials, which were placed below his own.
The Company of Goldsmiths’ archives from the first two decades of the nineteenth century record that silver plate sent by the firm to be assayed in Dublin was recorded in Williams’, and not her father’s, name. The partnership focussed on producing flatware, especially spoons of all types, and to a lesser extent other cutlery, as well as a variety of serving ware, teapots and decorative pieces. Their output was consumed by prosperous merchants and the gentry of Cork city, as well as across Munster, buoyed by the economic boom the region experienced through the Napoleonic era. The subsequent depression, compounded by the increased importation of manufactured plate and silverware from England, meant that after Carden’s death (16 July 1821), Williams closed the workshop (c.1822).
Williams’ designs resisted the excessive detailing and ostentatious flourishes of the predominant Regency style. Instead, the workshop undertook ‘some of the most accomplished production of neo-classical silver in Ireland’ (Bowen & O’Brien, 14), and is considered ‘delightfully different from anything being produced in Dublin’ (Bennett, 1972, 187). The fine silver the workshop produced is highly regarded two centuries later, widely collected and much sought after.
She established herself as a linen draper and haberdasher from the family’s Grand Parade premises, trading as ‘Jane Williams & Son’ (1824–7). However, there are no records of her activities in the years before her death in Cork on 17 April 1845. Of her children, two sons were unmarried while the other three married three sisters of the Crofts family of Buttevant, Co. Cork.