Featured Silver salts with medallions - Help with hallmarks please

Good day

I have this pair of salts (as pictured below) which I am rather fond of even though they are both damaged. The hallmarks are spread all over the pieces, even on the face of one of the medallions. I am hoping that they are sterling although one mark could be a "10" which I gather indicates French plate.

Help with dating and makers and any other interesting information in connection with them would be appreciated.

Please forgive the large number of photos but although they are a pair the marks are not identical.

Thank you.

 

With all those marks, I would suspect more likely Hanau (Germany) "Pseudo Marks", rather than French. Particularly the strangely shaped "rampant lion" (who is standing on his hind legs, so not really "rampant",) the various crowned letter, etc. I can't even tell whether what you are seeing as a 10 in a square is really that. And if these were French and plated, the maker's mark would also be inside a square and all those crowned letters would not be there.

Another possibility is Dutch, although it may simply be that what "looks" Dutch may again be the way Hanau makers "borrowed" similar marks from other jurisdictions. EDIT - Forget Dutch, the parts that look like Dutch marks would be too early for these.

Good pictures!

 

Thank you for your comments. It is interesting that Dutch came to mind because I believe that these came from a part of my family who lived in the Cape of Good Hope in the 19th C which was for a few hundred years a Dutch colony under the Dutch East India Company.

Lets hope one of the other experts on here comes up with something.

 

Beautiful silver, Silver.
Agree with Bakers (of course), the marks look Dutch but aren't, which also leads me to believe they could be Hanau pseudo-marks. Which doesn't mean the craftmanship is not good, it is.
The lion would be facing the right way if it were Dutch gold. But since this is silver the Dutch lion should be facing the other way.

The VOC went bankrupt in 1795, these were made later.
Silver marks from the VOC era could still have been in use, but I don't know. I don't know the marks for Cape silver either.
The only VOC silver mark I know, is for Batavia (Jakarta). Batavian silver never used Dutch marks, it had the Batavia town mark and a maker's mark. I would expect the Cape to have had a town mark as well.

 

Thank you for your info. Those Hanau boys certainly kept themselves busy! It's the second item in my small assortment of stuff that could be Hanau. (Actually the other item is definitely Hanau because someone here found a reference for the precise mark).

The thing is ... can I even rely on the salts being silver, as opposed to plate? I like them all the same, and use them when I have guests, but it would be nice to know that they were sterling or one of the lesser variants of "solid" silver.

 

The one on the left in your first picture appears to be missing a piece of the "swag" (to the left of the medallion.) Is that a trick of the camera or a place where it broke off?

 

With that amount of rubbing, a base metal would show.

Do you have a way to test them?
Hanau used different finenesses, these look like they could be .835.
.835 was based on the Austrian coin 'Maria Theresia Taler' (MTT silver, actually .833), which for a long time was the most reliable source of silver. For that reason it was the standard in many countries of the world, so .835 is not to be sneezed at.
For a long time MTT silver was much more reliable than sterling, which was based on the 'pond oosterling' a Dutch term for certain German silver coins. Oosterling means Easterner, Germany is to the east of the Netherlands.
The Brits, who traded a lot with the Dutch, read oosterling as 00sterling and dropped the 00 as superfluous. That is how the term 'sterling' came into use. A standard based on illiteracy.

One of the first things I noticed, and those are vulnerable. Silver uses them himself, so it is not much of a problem, and probably not very noticeable during a dinner when you don't look at them sideways anyway.
If they were silverplate, the break would show base metal.

 

That's why I asked.

 

Yes

yes, there's a piece of swag missing on that one (the piece is lost) and a medallion missing on the other one (which I have).

 

No, I don't have any means of testing. Certainly no chemical means. I have been reading on using the specific gravity method but I don't think I have a sufficiently accurate scale and I don't really understand how the method works. School science lessons were a long time ago

There's a lot of information you've given, and in the various other responses, which I will need to study more carefully later.