Eileen Moylan

Jewellery Designer & Goldsmith Cork

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You are here: Home / Archives for Hallmark

Is your silver too valuable to scrap?

02.08.2012 by Eileen Moylan //

There was an article in last Sunday’s Irish Independent about  the scrapping of valuable silver items. It was great to see this highlighted in a national paper. I have heard stories of valuable Irish silver works of art being sold for scrap as their true value was never investigated.

While an old scratched  silver spoon might seem only to be worth the weight of silver you might discover you have a collectors item. As all silver has a hallmark it is easy to find out if it is worth considerably more.

Unless ‘Antiques Roadshow’ is in town, checking the value of your silver sounds like a long and complicated process! So here’s a few simple tricks to examine your silverware.

Firstly, Is it silver? Many people over or under estimate the value of their silver. Most commonly they will see a hallmark and assume it’s solid silver. Unfortunatley this isn’t always the case and hallmarks are always better examined with a magnifying glass to read exactly what has been stamped. Some tea sets for example will be stamped with what looks to be a hallmark but on closer inspection will have the letters EPNS. This means that it is not solid silver but Electro Plated Nickel Silver ie. silver plated.

Once you have established that it is silver then look at the hallmark to decipher the country of origin. Here in Ireland it is more likely to have come from either Britain or Ireland. There are a number of assay offices in Britain all with different stamps so if you can make out an emblem like a rose or a lion it is most likely British. I would say before you start buying silver hallmark books the best way to find out what your hallmark means is to Google it! It’s surprising how much information comes up if you put in something as vague as ‘Lion Hallmark’

Then find out who made it. This is the mark that will most likely determine the value of your silver. The more collectible and well known the maker the more money for you! In the hallmark the first mark is the makers mark. The makers mark is made up of the initials of the company or individual. So in my case my makers mark is ‘EM’ for Eileen Moylan.

Again the best way to find out about the maker of your silver is to Google it. Here’s what I found when I put in ‘EM hallmark silver’ I’m just showing a section of the first result. Make sure to look at the shape of the punch so you can match it exactly. You can see from this image that there are a few EM’s differentiated by the shape.

From this you can find the full name of the maker and then search and see what is being written about them, like how much their work is going for.

And once you’ve done all that you can make an informed decision as to whether to scrap your silver or not!

Categories // My Workshop Tags // contemporary Irish silver, Hallmark, Irish Assay Office, Irish Hallmark, Irish Silver, Silver

Women Silversmiths

03.02.2011 by Eileen Moylan //

I was always under the impression that women silversmiths were a rarity in history. The only Irish female silversmith I had ever heard of was Jane Williams who worked with her father Carden Terry in Cork. Her work is well known not only for it’s beauty but also for its price. I did some searching about online and dug through the books I had to see if there were any more women out there in the world of silver. And if not, why not?!

Freedom of the City Box,Cork by Jane Williams and Carden Terry
Freedom of the City Box,Cork by Jane Williams and Carden Terry

From the assay office records available it seems that there were a number of female silversmiths although most of these were in England. In Ireland of the twenty I found only five of these were based outside Dublin. Most of these women were in business around the 1700’s which is probably due to influence of what was happening in Britain when silver became more attainable.

Up until the late 17th century silver items were mostly reserved for the church and the extremely wealthy. This began to change when silver prices dropped as it was being imported from Central and South America. Now for the first time the middle class could afford silver household objects. The trade had to adapt to the change from large ornate royal and ecclesiastical works to simple functional pieces.

Woman Burnishing Silverware
Woman Burnishing Silverware

To meet this growing market wives and other female relatives of silversmiths were brought into the trade. Many of these women didn’t just work as retailers but were hands on in the trade while younger girls would be brought in to finish and burnish the pieces. The silversmiths were extremely protective of their trade so they imposed a fine on anyone who brought a woman into the business that was not a close relative.

Although women would have served their apprenticeship they would then have to work under their husband’s mark. They would only be in a position to register their mark when their husband died. The mark would be set in a lozenge shape because this was the traditional heraldic symbol used to represent a widow. The woman would retain this mark for her business unless she married again which would mean she would again work under her husbands mark. For this reason women usually only cropped up occasionally mostly when they were widowed and between marriages! The only time women seem to be on the records consistently was when they were reported for a craft offense. Often men would let their wife take the blame for some substandard silver they had produced as they believed the fine would be less!

It’s difficult to trace what role women played in the manufacture of the work as unlike artist silversmiths weren’t in the habit of signing their work. The pieces would be hallmarked using the company stamp and therefore unless the paper work of the company remains their maker cannot be easily traced. This is the trouble with hallmarks, while they are brilliant at telling us the who,when and where of the piece, the ‘who’ can often be misleading. Often companies bought in blank silverware that they stamped with their own makers mark. There is also evidence that marks were stamped over with other marks.

It’s a pity that these women who did go about getting their marks registered make up only a small percentage of the women actually engaged in the craft of silversmithing. Thankfully times have changed and we no longer need to be widowed to get our name out there!

Now that I’ve found them, I’m going to do some research on these women and the work they produced for a later post.

The images used in this post were taken from ‘Women Silversmiths 1685-1845’  by the National Museum of Women in Arts

Categories // My Inspirations Tags // contemporary Irish silver, Hallmark, Irish Assay Office, Irish Hallmark, Makers Mark, Silver, silversmith, Women Silversmiths

How to Read a Hallmark

02.23.2011 by Eileen Moylan //

Before Christmas I wrote a post on the process of hallmarking and how and why you would send your work for hallmarking. To read this post click here.

My Silver Spoon
My Silver Spoon
Silver Spoon, showing hallmark
Silver Spoon, showing hallmark

I borrowed a silver spoon that my dad bought recently so I could write a post on how you go about reading a hallmark. You can see from the photo above this spoon has a clearly stamped hallmark. Although the makers mark is more faint as harder to read.

Hallmark, close up
Hallmark, close up

The first thing to do when reading a hallmark is to find out at which assay office it was hallmarked. I know from looking at this that it was hallmarked in Dublin because of the mark with the harp and crown. This mark is known as the mark of origin and is different for every assay office. While Dublin has the symbol of the harp and crown, Birmingham uses an anchor symbol and Edinburgh a castle. The Irish assay office no longer uses this, now we’re gone all European and just use the Hibernia mark and a metal fineness mark.

Irish Hallmarks
Irish Hallmarks

The second mark on this spoon is the mark of Hibernia. This mark was introduced by the Dublin assay office in 1731 so at least I know from this that the spoon was made after that year. This mark is still stamped on all silver hallmarked in Ireland.

There can also be a fourth mark which is the date letter. This letter changes every year and has a different font and shape every cycle. For example the shape of the date letter can change from a shield (1871-1895) to a rectangle (1896-1915)  The cycle can run from twenty four to twenty six years, from A to Z but sometimes they leave out letters. I have no idea why, but let me know if you do!

This spoon doesn’t have a date letter so I will have to use the other marks to give me a rough idea as to when it was hallmarked. One of the ways to do this is through the makers mark. If I can find out who ‘B.T’ is and when he/she was registered with the Dublin assay office I can find out in what period the spoon was made.

I found a great website that lists some makers registered to the Dublin assay office. Click here to see it. From this website I found out the ‘B.T.’ that made my spoon was Benjamin Tait. They list the year 1790 beside his name but it doesn’t give the date range when he was registered. So off I went on a google ing frenzy to find out all I could about Benjamin Tait. Unfortunately I couldn’t find out much about Mr Tait so back I went to my book of hallmarks to see the Dublin marks for that period.

Dublin Hallmarks
Dublin Hallmarks

It turns out that the 1790 harp and hibernia marks were in ovals unlike in my spoon where they are rectangular. They remained rectangular from 1793 to 1809  so I can deduce from this that my spoon was hallmarked during this period.

So that’s my guide to reading a hallmark. From those three little stamps I found out that the spoon was made by Benjamin Tait between 1793 and 1809 and was hallmarked in Dublin Castle.

Categories // My Thoughts Tags // Benjamin Tait, Hallmark, Irish Assay Office, Irish Hallmark, Irish Silver, Silver, silversmith

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