Featured Silver or not so silver tray?

Hi everyone,

I recently came upon this tray, buried in dust in an antique shop in Bulgaria. It was worth a couple of dollars. Could you help me figure out whether is it silver or silver-plated? Any other infomation about it is also welcome. It is pretty heavy for its size and it also has a small stamp (see pictures below), which says "argento" which in Italian means "silver". However I tried polishing it with baking soda, since it had pretty big yellow stains, and while it got shinier, it didn't turn silver. Thank you in advance!

 

Silver plated at best. Never heard of polishing silver with baking soda.

If this was Italian solid silver it would be marked with the official Italian marks and I don't see any of those about.

 

Really? It’s pretty common I think. So the argento mark does not mean anything basically?

 

Maybe common elsewhere? Not in the US. And as you know, it did not work very well.

 

The yellowish spots were there before that. they were just darker. I think “it did not work” because it’s just silver plated. And no, I know people in the US who also clean ss with baking soda. (;

 

Well, if being silver plated kept the baking soda from working, I rest my case. The surface of silver plate is sterling, so if it's supposed to work on solid silver, it should have worked on a a plated tray. Of course, you've got that blotchy yellow stain to deal with and I have never seen that happen before. Do you know what caused it?

There are a number of "home remedies" for cleaning tarnish from silver and silver plate, many of which are damaging to the goods. I don't know that baking soda would harm silver, but I have no intention of using it to clean my silver items. Liquid or cream polish does a perfectly good job at a reasonable cost.

 

Thanks!

 

I have no idea what caused the spots. What I meant when I said that it didn’t help because it is silver plated is, that the silver plating was probably missing from the yellow spots, so there’s no way for any polishing to fix that.

 

Yes, that would be true.

 

I have posted baking soda paste with a soft toothpaste brush for removing tarnish here a number of times.It is common use in the USA by professional silver plating services and jewelers to also remove plating "smut" in the plating process.

 

I am not really familiar with the mark on this tray, but I'm just wondering if it could possibly say ARGENTOR, which might indicate that it is Austrian, not Italian, and from Rust & Hetzel, Argentor Werke (silver works) of Vienna.

Here is a close-up of the mark on the original poster's tray, followed by one of the Rust & Hetzel, Argentor Werke silver plate marks:




from: Argentor-Werke Rust & Hetzel: history and marks (silvercollection.it)
(the site also has more info about the silver works' history, etc)

 

good eyes SBSVC

 

What size is it? It could have held a shallow glass dish to hold butter if the correct size.

 

This is exactly what it is I think! Thank you!

 

It’s 7.8 inches, and the indented part is 5.9 inches so it could very well be a butter plate.

 

The complete name of the company is Argentor-Werke Rust & Hetzel. Argentor-Werke is not German for silverworks, the German word for silver is Silber.
Their products mostly seem to have been plated.

A page from a 1904 catalogue, these vases could be ordered as silverplate, antiqued silverplate, or gold plated:

 

In England, any so-called "silver" item that doesn't carry a recognised assay mark, is known as/called "White Metal" and will usually be advertised/sold as such, especially at auction houses. An assay mark is generally considered to be the only firm guarantee that an item is silver in terms of its content.