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rubbed hallmark on fork
rubbed hallmark on fork
i'm not sure if this is plate or a silver mark, the marker's mark could be HSO or ESO or upside down CSH
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Hi,
Pseudo marks are designed to look like official hallmarks, so yes they are fakes but it does not mean all pseudo marked items are below the standard they purport to be or that they are meant to deceive, although of course some are and do, many early colonial smiths copied marks from their mother countries because their new communities had yet to form a system of assaying, others like Chinese export silver were pseudo marked with English marks because they were making identical copies of the flatware down to the last detail to order,
Regards Trev.
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Pseudo marks are designed to look like official hallmarks, so yes they are fakes but it does not mean all pseudo marked items are below the standard they purport to be or that they are meant to deceive, although of course some are and do, many early colonial smiths copied marks from their mother countries because their new communities had yet to form a system of assaying, others like Chinese export silver were pseudo marked with English marks because they were making identical copies of the flatware down to the last detail to order,
Regards Trev.
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SilverSurfer
- contributor
- Posts: 267
- Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 12:42 am
Hi! Just to help a bit (hopefully), American pseudo-hallmarks of the early nineteenth century, as yours seem to be, are "fakes" in that there was indeed no real hallmark system operative in America, save a unique system in Baltimore. So such pseudo-marks were generally made to loosely mimic the strict British system in order to represent quality, but the American marks have no consistent meaning as do each and every mark of the Brit system (sterling standard, date, town, duty paid), and the American marks were usually unique to each individual producer (some, such as the monarch's head, were used by many, but, unlike the Brit marks, the actual form varied with each producer, since they were concocted and applied by individual producers, and not by a central hall). That said, such American marks generally do indicate a piece of coin silver, nominally .900 fine, as compared to the contemporary Brit .925 sterling standard. This can be tricky, though, and for the neophyte collector, later silverplate marks might be confused with these coin silver pseudo-hallmarks.
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