Hi, just bought a Robert Wallis 1844 tea caddy spoon fiddle pattern, and it has floral engraving in the bowl. Would this have been added later, or was this sort of bowl decoration done by 1844? I know by 1844 they were doing engraving and bright cut on the spoon handle but what about the bowl? Thank you!
Is it so hard to take a good resolution photo and then attach a question?
Sorry, new here, didn’t realize that a photo was a requirement. But until I load the photo was it common practice to add engraving to the bowl in this period?
Isn’t it obvious? Would you rather go to the doctor or get a telehealth consultation?
Sorry Doc, I’ll get on it right away
I’m not a doctor, I’m not even a nurse… I just like the order of solved puzzles.
The key to solving this little mystery is to identify the maker. In this case, it’s Robert Wallis, and the registered date for that maker’s mark is spot on, matching the 1844 hallmark precisely. Do a quick online search for Robert Wallis spoon, and take a look at the images that come up. This kind of floral pattern is what he apparently specialized in, so there seems to be little doubt that the engraving is contemporary, and not a later “improvement.”
Ok thanks. I thought the engraving looked more late Victorian but I’m no expert. Anyway it’s a pretty piece and I do love it
That was my gut reaction, too. The engraving looked like something from a later era. It wasn’t until I started doing some online searching that I found the evidence to the contrary. 
Thank you for posting such a pertinent question. Is the work done to the surface of the silver item contemporary with the manufacture or later and if not part of the manufacture who did it and when?
Silver style, like most fashioned items, ebbs and flows. From baroque and rococo to austere and back to massive and complex in the 1820’s as the arguments with us over tea ended and our silver mines relieved you of the need to steal the stuff off the Spaniards who stole it off the Peruvians.
There are times in English history when it was a crime – a capital crime-- to own highly decorated plate. That Norfolk squire’s rebellion against divine power, whose portrait shows him " warts and all" caused the Royalists to melt down nearly all their Tudor and early Stuart plate, then create a fashion for really dreadful minimalist arts and craftsy rubbish and ended up putting English silversmiths at a distinct disadvantage to the ebullient French goldsmiths favored by Charles II who arrived in your country when the French King repealed Nantes.
I can forgive Oliver topping Charlie I, but his casual destruction of some of the finest silver ever made of Tudor origin is more difficult to forget.
We got reminded how good it was recently when a suite sent to the Czar by Henry VIII’s youngest daughter turned up in Moscow post glasnost. The modern Brits were so stunned by its elegance they forgot to bid on it and we got it over here.
Silver, it is worth reminding ourselves always served three functions: asset storage or banking, bling or showing off and whatever it was made to be used for from Crespin’s missing bathtub, lost in the Lisbon earthquake, to Wallis’s pretty little kati spoons of which you have a pristine example.
My esteemed colleague correctly suggests your decorating question can be answered by a look at the Wallis silver makers. Specifically Robert.
He is right. Kati, or Caddy spoons to use the English word, have been around for ever. Norrie writes well on this matter. The Romans had them, although they didn’t have either coffee or tea. They became popular about the time someone came up with a system of making spoons using a press rather than banging them out of bars or ingots. (And no it wasn’t the Batemans, Hester got all her sheet metal from Birmingham and fashioned it in the 2,870 sq foot family workshop in London) .
The late Georgian, regency and early Victoria presses run by water or steam could bang out spoons as a rate to meet all demand which is why you and I can still buy utensils made back then cheaper than we can buy raw silver coming out of a mine just down the road from me today.
So what? So you would have needed a lot of even extraordinarily badly paid engravers to keep up with the presses. Wallis was making his money out of mass production not wigglework. Some other bloke got that thankless task. And, yes your work is done by hand using gravins and burins over a leather bag. Punches and cutters if you haven’t been hanging around annoying your local friendly silversmith.
Okay so contemporary or later? Well it’s always later unless it is part of the dye. Even if it is only 10 minutes later.
Engravers are part of the great unsung panopy of Victorian workers grubbing away in London’s then leafless suburbs. With some exceptions. One of which was Robert Wallis who is no relation to your silversmith and made his name engraving plates for Bartlett who travelled around making drawings of places all over the emerging British colonial empire. Including a couple of the waterfront here.
Your design, a sort of mix of flora and pin punch tattoo could be anything from Roman to William Morris. The way it is done give us more clue and here, Bartholomew’s strident insistence on your using your iphone to take a high pixel picture paid dividends. It might not have been done by Wallis, in fact it almost certainly wasn’t, and it might not have been done in his workshop as he too was space challenged but it was almost certainly contemporary. Because it is by hand. Even 20 years later the method would have used pattern machinery to assist. This is one-off.
If you have been scuttering around the internet looking for Robert and his ilk you will be pleased to note your spoon workshop sponsor is also no relation to Robert Wallis, convicted of forging the Goldsmiths’ Hall mark to a silver gilt watch, and sentenced to six years’ penal servitude according to the South Wales Echo of September 1885. (If I can use “kati” I can use “scuttering” both southern Asian in origin, the first relating to weight then container of weight then spoon and the latter exactly what it sounds like.)
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Many thanks to all of you, but particularly Guildhall for your in depth response (as florid and precise as the engraving on my tea caddy (kadi) spoon). Also creates many other questions. Can one assume that most spoons created after the late Georgian period were punched out as blanks by machine? And therefore would spoons before say 1810 ergo be made by hand (or several hands)? Thank you again
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"In 1769, John Pickering patented a new stamping press that revolutionised the way in which silver could be made. Pickering was a London toy maker with his products mostly made from copper and brass, but the silver trade quickly adopted the idea to make component parts and whole objects from sheet silver. The process involved making shaped dies in the desired form and stamping sheet metal against an opposing die; it was the beginning of mass production and allowed silversmiths to produce pieces more quickly and more cheaply.
“The larger workshops and specialist manufactories would have invested in the new machinery and had dies made to suit their needs. The workshop managed by Hester Bateman was famously one of the early protagonists and successfully produced attractive, well-designed silverware at prices affordable to the middle classes. In line with the silver trade of the 19th and 20th centuries, some manufacturers would have been specialist suppliers to the trade, whether that be in component or whole item form…This can sometimes pose difficulties in identifying the actual maker of particular items as retailer silversmiths would often buy-in either semi-finished or finished products and have them marked with their own punches.”
The Earliest Silver Caddy Spoons » Antique Silver Spoons.
The entire article is well worth reading. Only thing is, and I have touched in this elsewhere and in this forum, the presumption is Hester, saddled with a bunch of kids and a dead buckle maker for a husband managed to raise the cash to fund a sheet metal presser and basically became the Marks and Sparks of the 18th century silversmithing.
Never happened.
Matthew Boulton and Watts, yes that Watts, the steam engine guy, made that investment and the sheet silver she used was shipped in from Birmingham.
Bit of irony there a brass toy maker and a electro plater were responsible for the mechanization of the silver industry from about 1790.
But no, machines never replaced hand crafting they simply cut out a lot of the drudgery some of which was downright dangerous.
Of course the mechanization of the industry led to a rebellion against it and that is the Arts and Crafts movement which saw use of a lot of higher grade silver – Britannia Standard instead of sterling – and a lot of plenishing and rather less smoothing out the hammer marks. Sort of self conscious Luddite-ing. Omar Ramsden sort of stuff. To me it’s like when your daughter decides to try out mum’s lipstick and insists on heading out wearing it. Very definitely gilding the lily, if you’ll pardon the quote.
In your country The Hart Exhibition in Compton Verney recently "…explored the evolution of a unique living tradition in design and silversmithing which has its origins in the Arts and Crafts Movement.
“Architect, designer and social reformer Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942) established The Guild of Handicraft in Whitechapel in 1888. Inspired by the anti-industrialism of John Ruskin and William Morris, Ashbee believed that good design and craftsmanship depended on good social conditions and in 1902 Ashbee, the guildsmen and their families, moved from their homes in London’s East End to the Cotswold town of Chipping Campden.”
The Hart Silversmiths: A Living Tradition | Apollo Magazine.
So I get asked what’s next? If Arts and Crafts was a bit retro for some tastes, what now? If you get curious about answers to that the Guild libraries tracing recent past and mapping the present, provides some clues.
Here’s one: Today we produce as a side product of mining other metals more silver every year than we did in the entire history of mankind until the Persians grabbed ahold of the Turkish silver mines, which the Greeks – specifically Alexander the Not-so-great-unless-you were-Greek grabbed off them and turned into architecture.
We only use about two per cent of modern silver production for non-industrial purposes, the rest ends up in places like car engines and computers. Silver has some extraordinary properties which no other metal does. One of which is if you use it to eat off it kills a lot of bugs that can and will kill you. Medical and dental use of silver was widespread. through the first war until Fleming came up with antibiotics.
So eat off and drink out of silver. You probably won’t live any longer, but you will have done so more elegantly.
Nobody has really done much to improve the dynamics of flatware since the French heard the Italians had invented the fork. The English cottoned onto forks slightly later probably put off by the fact the French were using them in the first place. Time to come up with something better. The spoon is even worse. Basically a bowl on the end of a stick. And don’t get me started on knives especially the ones the English use with no points on them by royal decree after that dinner meltdown at Dunvegan Castle. Usual problem with the McLeods and the MacDonalds and folks getting stabbed and chucked down the toilet towers before we invented family law and no-fault divorce. Anyway time for something new. Take a look at the table manners of those two guys stuck in space with one women for 210 days and counting and you can see where improvements are needed. CRWW
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I should have said “one women stuck in space with two guys…” I shall have the woke crowd after me. And their metaphorical knives will have points even if their arguments are blunt. CRWW
This perfectly describes my life ethos, my dining table tenue, to use a word that had common currency around the time my caddy spoon was created. Excellent articles, thank you. Another question if you’ll continue indulging me: what are the tell tell signs that engraving has been done by hand?
and thank you again
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Engineered patterning is a machine-precise multiple iteration of indents. Look for it on cigaret cases and the like in the latter half of the 19th and on until today. No hand production could or would try to duplicate that. What works for silver works for lace and carpets. The human brain can create things to repeat over and over and over again – the wheel being the best example, but it could never bother doing it. It was the perfection of machine-produced work that the likes of Ruskin rebelled against deciding with some justification back then that the repetition of loom or lathe work not only robbed the work of its benefit from human origin but dehumanized those engaged in its work. Today where machines like the one you are using to ask me the question do all the grunt work, we have gone past Ruskin’s perceived tussle between man and machine and are rapidly becoming cyber serfs to it. Or to put it more simply the machine seems to have won and Huxley’s brave new world has arrived.
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Thank you again. So the period (pre 1850) and the very slight imperfections (the not quite perfect meeting of the dots near the neck, slight waviness in the lines) suggest hand engraved? So machine decorations would be marked into the die? Did they ever use machine tools like you see in tattoo parlours? Sorry to be a bother, but fascinated by the manufacturing process both for pre industrialized and post for flatware and holloware.
Also, it seems from your references to “your country” that you think I’m British. Though British sterling is my favourite, we are, in fact, I believe, residents of the same Dominion of His Majesty’s realm.
There isn’t really any hard and fast date for machine vs hand engraving. If you consider every tool a hand powered “machine” it’s a gradual process. Delighted to make an acquaintance of a fellow Canadian. But yes, I presumed since this blog originated in the UK most of its adherents were Brits. Go into ebay and look for “engine turned” cigaret cases and you will see machine work the hand couldn’t really do. Now look for " bright cut" silver on the same website and you will see a type of decorative engraving used on metal objects, especially those made of silver created by making a series of short cuts into the metal, using a polished engraving tool that causes the exposed surfaces to reflect light and give an impression of brightness which in the days of gutting candles was as vital as the pier mirrors on the wall to reflect light. CRWW
Ok I think I get it now, after a rabbit hole deep dive into engine turning. Fascinating stuff. Some of the cigaret (to use your archaic spelling) cases use the Guilloche (the kind of bedsheet pattern) on the outside and the Perlee (overlapping circles) on the inside which is very cool. The bright cut as you point out is quite different. That said some on ebay that say bright cut and are on late 19th c American silver appear to me (or maybe it’s just the photographs) to be die stamped in the manner of bright cut. I’ll have to train my eye to spot the difference. I just don’t see that much 18th c bright cut in real life at my price point lol. Thank you again.