posted 03-30-2003 12:26 PM            

Would you say these are Narragansett or Naragansett style?

posted 03-30-2003 02:41 PM            

The two spoons on the left were described in Gorham's catalogs as "5 o'clock tea spoons". There were twelve designs in all. Five were in the Narragansett style, one had a large fish as its handle, and one used the Hizen pattern. The other five were less interesting. I think the spoons first appeared in 1888.

The oyster forks are something I haven't seen before. They use the handles from 3 of the aforementioned 5 o'clock spoons. Gorham produced a Narragansett-style set of forks called "Blue Point," but these forks are different. Presumably yours date from the same period as the spoons, but I was unable to locate them in the Gorham catalogs. Maybe they were a special order (or I just missed them in the catalogs). Are the forks marked with any numbers?

Here is the 1888 Gorham catalog page from the CD-ROM set.

posted 03-30-2003 03:38 PM            

I quickly checked the forks and found no numbers on them, just the Gorham lion, anchor and G mark near the throat, along with "sterling" higher up on the handle.

posted 03-30-2003 03:49 PM            

Gorham also produced teaspoons with those handles. Rather than having shell bowls, they have regular smooth teaspoon bowls.

posted 03-30-2003 10:39 PM            

A word of caution though; the spoons at least have been faked through casting. I recently saw a cast fake of the spoon with the crab handle and shell bowl. It was well done and superficially convincing, but if you looked carefully you could see where all of the decoration was simply part of a single casting, rather than having each piece formed and applied separately. You could also see the traces of the original STERLING stamp on the stem where the casting picked it up. As I recall it had a decent looking fake Gorham mark on the the back of the bowl.
Your forks do look pretty good from the picture, but they might be worth a close examination to see if the seaweed and animals are applied as they should be. Because of the high prices these things are bringing, they would be a natural choice for the faker, unfortunately. I have one of the original spoons with the shell bowl and fish handle, and I was crazy enough to pay about $100 to have a new tail put on one fish where it had broken off!

Brent

posted 03-31-2003 10:23 AM            

Any way, I doubt if anyone would cast these and then sell for for a few dollars each. That wouldn't be very cost effective.

posted 05-23-2018 10:56 PM            

I just won an auction for one of the larger Narragansett-style nut dishes or master salts at my favorite charity shop (for a reasonable price), so I went online to see what else is out there. Out of the 14 listings I saw for Gorham Narragansett-style nut dishes/almond dishes/salts, two are obvious fakes/recasts. The others look okay, as far as I can tell from photos. The dealer offering the fakes wants astronomical prices for them. I wonder whether s/he's just careless, or actively dishonest.

And I wonder who made the recasts, and whether they're still being made, or whether the ones we're seeing were all made earlier than 15 years ago, when Brent mentioned their existence.

posted 05-24-2018 11:21 AM            

But the seller of the other two is very experienced and ought to know better! And maybe DOES know better.

I find it interesting to think about what happens to fakes as the market changes. When a particular item, period, or style is hot, fake-makers may cash in by making fakes. The fakes might help bring the market down by making the items seem less rare and untrustworthy. And fashions might change, bringing the market down as well.

But once the market has fallen, the fakes still exist. I've sometimes found myself reasoning, "This item is not that valuable to begin with, so why would anyone bother faking it? It's probably real." But while the item may not be valuable at the moment, maybe it was in the past.

posted 05-24-2018 06:32 PM            

I'm confident mine is one of the real ones. The marks are nice and sharp, in a different spot from the fakes', which have them inside the little shell-shaped foot. The sand on mine is sharp and applied, rather than part of the casting, and it's a different shape from the sand on the fakes, which all have the same sand as each other (or all the ones I've seen do, anyway). The edges of mine are finished with applied weathering: they have "cracks" that were clearly cut out with a saw; on the fakes, they're filled in, since the casting isn't fine enough to capture them. And mine has a nicely engraved monogram; I wouldn't expect a fake to have a monogram at all, let alone a convincing 19th century-looking one. And the fakes I've seen have an additional STERLING stamp in a different typeface.

posted 05-25-2018 02:17 PM            

I wonder whether they got the basic shape of the mussel shells by casting actual shells, then manipulated them to make them more individual. Some of the shells on those spoons look lifelike enough that I'd believe it if you told me they were based on casts of actual shells.