Featured Hallmarks. Where to start?

I was looking for a couple spoons I sold recently and came upon this one. I honestly don’t recall even owning it. No clue when or where it came from. It’s damn nice though. Excellent crest, heavy gauge of silver, and a rat tail. The marks may as well be Martian though. Anyone have an idea of what I’m looking at here? The makers mark is normal enough but what I presume are the hallmarks look awfully foreign to me.

 

There’s no hallmarks there, looks like American coin silver with a makers mark. The marks above the D.D. seem to be something decorative or symbolic, not sure what and the J.M. being the owner.
https://www.americansilversmiths.org/makers/silversmiths/93616.htm

 

Thanks for the reply. I’m pretty familiar with American coin silver. I own at least a hundred pieces, probably quite a few more. Mostly 19th century and a bit of 18th century. It’s an area I’m really interested in. At one point I was considering trying to obtain an example by every known northeastern maker. I thought it would be a fun pursuit. This would be much easier achieved for 19th century production obviously. I was actually digging out some coin silver when I found this piece. If this is American coin silver with a rattail it will be quite the treasure. American rattail spoons are pretty hard to come by. It’s not something I had considered. After considering it I’m not sure I’d bet my spoon on it but that would be awesome if it were. While the marks clearly don’t resemble any known (to me or you) European or other old world hallmarks they also don’t resemble any American coin silver marks like I’ve ever seen. I assume they are badly worn. To me the spoon seems old world rather than new. I’d like nothing more than for it to be American though now that you’ve mentioned it. I’ll break it out soon and get a better image of the makers mark. Dupuy’s work doesn’t show any similar markings or use of rattails. It’s possible it’s not a DD, even though that’s what it looks like in my photos. I wasn’t focusing the camera on the makers mark until I had a direction to go with the other marks. Thank you for opening my mind to American being a possibility.

 

Hunhhh, that's an odd one - and believe it's extremely unlikely to be American. Rattails weren't typically in use by the time Fiddle patterns developed, and personally can't recall seeing any, other than 19th century Irish pieces. To my eye, the marks resemble squished/distorted hallmarks often found on bottom-marked spoons (struck on the stem), the result of hammering the stem back to normal after stamping widened the area around the mark - but wouldn't expect to see bottom-marking on an Irish rattail Fiddle, top-marking the norm by the end of the 18th century. That's all I've got, but you might consider researching the crest for the family...

Here are six Irish spoons, three Old English pattern with a 1779 bottom-marked pair, and three Fiddle pattern, all top-marked, one from 1832 with a rattail:

https://www.leopardantiques.com/object/stock/detail/1143


~Cheryl

 

Great information Cheryl. I have a handful of British teaspoons with stem placed bottom marks that are extremely distorted. I always wondered how they got that way. I’m glad to read your explanation as to how that may have happened. I also wondered what happened the marks on the spoon I’ve posted. In addition to being worn, something is clearly wonky about them. Being reshaped after being hallmarked makes all the sense in the world. I too had thought about Irish or Scottish being an option.

I’m not great at getting definitive results when researching crests but that is a good route to go down here if the marks can offer little in the way of direction. The main motifs were recycled so often that I often have a hard time pinning a variation of them down. I guess more practice can only improve my odds.

 

A possibility may be Daniel Dewar of Perth. The nearest mark to the initials has a look of the thistle seen on Perth marks, as for the other two they could be almost anything.

 

Hmm. Thanks for the reply! I can’t seem to find a Perth thistle mark. Is it drastically different than an Edinburgh thistle mark?