posted 03-20-2012 10:21 AM            

My questions about all of these are: When, where, who?

#1: Adorable little teaspoon, 4 1/4 inches, Old English (? that's what it's called, right?), mark too worn for me to read, block-style E monogram, drop and bow or maybe bouquet swage on back of bowl.

Can anyone read what's left of the mark? Guess the approximate date? Country of origin?

posted 03-20-2012 10:28 AM            

Teaspoon 5 inches long, mark too worn to read, block monogram B over AM, plain drop. A pleasing, well balanced spoon.

Oops, I forgot to take a picture of the whole back.

posted 03-20-2012 11:21 PM            

All the guesses above are just by feel and not fact... I really do not know what I am doing and will bow to the real experts, who I hope will set me straight.

posted 03-21-2012 02:37 PM            

I would think #1 is American. English fancy backs are generally found on Hanoverian spoons rather than the later Old English. I can’t decipher the marks but prior to 1780s an English teaspoon might have just two marks low on the stem: maker’s and lion passant (not leopard’s head). I can’t read either mark as a lion passant. From 1784 English teaspoons would be top-marked with a fuller set of marks including the duty head. The decoration on the bowl looks to me as if it might actually be a shell with some added twirly flourishes. I hesitate to try and guess a date with only a limited knowledge of how and when American fashions changed.

I’d go along with Agleopar as far as #2 is concerned and also with regard to the American look of #3. However I would think #3 is a bit later than he suggests. In England bright cutting was fashionable in the 1790s and early 1800s and I wouldn’t normally expect to see it earlier than this on American silver. Incidentally, the jargon here would term this one a scroll back.

posted 03-21-2012 03:23 PM            

agphile, thank you for your thoughts and info. I think the man I bought most of these spoons from must have bought the estate of a collector with a great eye. He told me he specializes in estates and often doesn't look at the stuff carefully until the moment he sells it.

Saturday I bought two pairs of tea tongs and four spoons from him (the three spoons shown here, along with an unmarked bright-cut teaspoon similar to the one with the foliate scroll, which happened to have my best friend's initials). He gave me such a great price that I went back the next day and bought the Samuel Minott, the bird-back David Hall, the Peter Field Jr. coffin-end, and a couple of English sugar bows. Now I'm regretting passing up a set of six very pretty coffin end spoons that he had--if they were from the same estate, I bet they were good ones.

(The Mattias Haverstick and the probably European dog nose were from someone else.)

Here's a close-up of the back of spoon #1. Do you still think it's a shell?

posted 03-25-2012 08:16 PM            

It's a family ancestor to the Watts drop, of a sort...

posted 03-27-2012 06:45 AM            

One small pamphlet on bird back spoons is “Flights of Fancy American Silver Bird-Decorated Spoons” by Donald L. Fennimore. Additionally there is an interesting article in the March-April 1989 issue of Silver Magazine by John McGrew entitled “Basket of Flowers: A Preliminary Study”. Both of these publications are “image heavy” and are interesting to read. I think the Flights of Fancy is available from used book stores and the Silver Magazine article may still be available from the Silver magazine folks.