posted 03-21-2003 03:21 PM            

Any ideas?
Can you get this puzzlement out of my hair?

Maurice

posted 03-24-2003 07:00 PM            

I thought I would post a later comb just as an example, this is a particularly gaudy one. Normally they have a plain bright cut top, but the attached tines are similar and they don't ever seem to be marked. I guess the later ones are ca. 1850 and American.
Maurice

posted 03-24-2003 10:55 PM            

Page 112 of Marks of American Silversmiths by Robert Alan Green has your I.S.W. mark with the sheaf of wheat. That sheaf is identical, at least to my eye, as the one on my Tunis Dubois spoon. Green does not identify I.S.W. (I.S.W. no doubt is a yet to be identified southern smith.)

posted 03-25-2003 12:35 AM            

I don't understand what makes the same wheat mark into a Southern piece?

I hope Pat didn't say what you think she said. There are a number of reasons for backstamping. Normally a major supplier sends silver to a minor retailer or a less industrial producer down South.

Shared marks don't mean the same producer, anymore than do shared banding, handles, etc. In other words shared marks aren't necessarily the same as backstamping.

In the case of this mark I would think there are two more likely explanations. Either the wheat mark was produced for both silversmiths by the same die cutter, or the mark went into Dubois' estate and (comme l'habitude) his maker's mark was destroyed but his wheat mark was purchased by I.S.W..

I don't know what a "temperance pitcher" is, I never stopped personally. I have never seen a Brasier piece with that mark, but I would like to do so. I think for a normal piece of holloware by Chaudron & Rasch it would be easy to tell the producer. They had a very idiosyncratic way of soldering. Could you send me or post a picture of the bottom?

posted 05-12-2003 02:36 PM              

An article in the Winterthur Portfolio [23(1) 1988:25-50] by Christine Laidlaw provides the answer. This particular sheaf of wheat pseudohallmark was a trademark of Teunis D. Dubois, a commercial suipplier of silver to the trade. His mark appears alone as one or two strikes, or with one or the other of the eagle head marks of his brother, Joseph, with whom he was partnered, and in combination with that of the retailer. He marked and sold his own silver, and supplied a number of prominent silversmiths in New York (eg W.G.Forbes, John Vernon and others associated with the Dutch silversmithing community to which he and his brother were linked) and elsewhere. The I.S.W. mark is illustrated with this sheaf of wheat mark, and is attributed to one of these, John Schuyler Walter.

Stuart Warter