This punch ladle is 14 1/2 inches long; the actual silver piece measures some 5 x 3 1/2 inches. It is marked only with '12' for the .750 silver standard and the letter 'E'.
Is this an Erfurt piece? Based on the design, would anyone hazard a guess as to when it was made?
PS: Do you or anyone else happen to know when Erfurt stopped using the 'E' and perhaps what symbol was used between then and 1886?
The German marks page say the 'E' was used in the 17th and 18th Centuries, and this is confirmed in one of my books. If the ladle really is from Erfurt, it must be a late example of an 'E' marked piece...
Hi Mikael,
Your ladle looks to have been made c.1820-1850. I suspect an "E" was continued well into the 19th century, but don't know what form it took. Your example may well be one of them and I look forward to hearing other opinions of it.
Regards, Tom
Hello, looks indeed like an old Erfurt piece. Congrats. Very little has been published on the subject of Erfurt marks since Rosenberg. The last study I am aware of came out in 1929. It is not known how or if the city mark was used in the 19th century. From what is known about the use of towns marks in other German cities in the 19th century, the Erfurt city mark was most likely in use at least until the German guilds (including that of the goldsmiths’) were dissolved in the 1850ies. I seem to remember 1853 as the exact date, but I may not be quite exact here. Since then, if no new local rules were established and enforced, it was pretty much up to the individual maker to decide, whether he wanted to continue using the “old” city mark or not. There is no pattern here. Some used it until the 1880ies, other disabandoned it in the early 1860ies. It is not known how the Erfurt makers handled this. So there is no exact way of telling how old this piece is, at least not by looking at the marks. The style might help to narrow this down. The bowl of this piece is in the so-called “Second Rococo” style, which became popular in Germany in the 1860ies. So I would date this a little later than Tom, ca. 1860, give or take a few years. Best wishes, Bahner
Hello Bahner - and thank you very much for the detailed and interesting account of that rather fascinating time in German silver production.
The Erfurt silver tradition is interesting to me, in parts because it was, as I understand it, one of the first German cities to hallmark silver. The city of Erfurt also has a very rich history, with the 19th Century being particularly dramatic: the city became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1802, in 1806 it was part of the First French Empire, but in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, it returned to Prussia albeit enclosed by Thuringian territory.
