No other marks at all except minerva with a 1, and the D monogram. So .950 siver and French but I can’t figure anything else out. I know its a long shot with no other markings but thought i would check with this illustrious group just in case. Thank you!
Timbale cup part set attributable to Alfred Rousseau. His shop mark, which appears to be missing, is a diamond with a capital A and R either side of a wheel. The leaf engraving has been done later and likely by someone else around the .950 post-1838 national Minerva mark.
CRWW
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Many thanks, and not doubting you, but how did you come up with Alfred Rousseau? Was he the fin de siecle Timbale cup king? Scanned the cups again scrupulously and couldn’t find any other marks. Also google didn’t yield much as to what a Timbale is? I used to bring them along when the kids were toboganning so the other dads and I could have a nip of rye whisky to keep out the cold. It seems the French used them for other purposes?
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Guildhall is a mastermind!
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Fair question. This is an attribution based on similar, to all intents and purposes, identical product by Rousseau rather than a “for sure he made it”, which is impossible to do absent marks or collateral purchase evidence.
For sixty years I have had to rely on my own memory or inventory to identify product where markings are either worn or absent, In the last decade I have started to use both AI and image matching technology to search hundreds of thousands of images. It will boil it down to a few hundred, I then use my own aging database I carry around on my shoulders, to sort through that. It works about half the time.
Think of it as a dating service for antiques or matching up stuff that has got split up sometimes decades ago.The tools are being used by Alphabet too but, while they have more access to more images than you or I might, their boolean searches are less focused so it very often ends up “garbage in garbage out”.
Another less technical way of putting the same thing is you have to ask the right question to get the right answer, proving once again what every good trial lawyer learns quickly, the question is always more important than the answer.
Unfortunately, while we are in early days of developing these tools in the trade, we are already seeing systems we are developing being used to create virtually indistinguishable duplicates of period material. In China, where I am next week, I visit towns — towns mind you — dedicated to reproduction of – well pretty much anything. It’s sort of like Jermyn Street, London circa 1880 on steroids. On my last trip I took a massive mid-nineteenth century Barnard epergne over – about 24 pounds weight of silver and asked a shop to copy it so I had two, one for each end of a long table. It took a month and cost me about $2,000 in labor and the raw silver value but I now have a pair. In case you are wondering the duplicate is marked with the chop mark of the maker! I bought the original a few years ago for $15,000 and the person for whom it was made for originally paid the equivalent of $84,000 of today’s dollars. I have the receipt.
So the question is does technology make our professional lives easier or merely add another layer of complexity. In the case of your item it helped. But the same machines that identify can duplicate, far better than any 19th century fraudster could.
Watch for Chinese stuff to come up on ebay. It does about twice a month. If you spot it, write them and the owner/seller will likely pull it or label it out of period. In your country, if you are in England ,you have a wonderful hall marking system which we lack in most of the rest of the world. But even that system lacks the teeth it had a century or so ago when a good forgery got you a free trip to Tasmania and a hundred years before that, prior to 1783 to Tyburn where bits got chopped off or necks stretched.
(I can never hear “Oranges and Lemons say the bell of (list)” without thinking of that trip listening to the London bells.)
CRWW
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Rousseau it is. And please invite me to your next soiree when you roll out the twin eperg es! Thanks again