Cant anyone date my salt cellar?

[curiouscat]

Looking for approximate age of my little salt cellar ...

 

[Red-Coat]

Difficult to date based on style alone. Are there no marks on it at all? I assume it's not silver.

Stylistically it has some similarities to this piece of Russian silver, which dates to 1878, but this one has maker and assay marks for Moscow.



The bowed legs on yours (rather than ball feet) could easily put it in the late 1700s but without a mark of some kind it's impossible to say unless an exact match turns up somewhere with an attribution.

 

[DigDug216]

Salt Cellar? Why does it have a name like that?

 

[Red-Coat]

Salt Cellar? Why does it have a name like that?

Like many English terms, our word "salt" (originally "sealt" in Old English) got corrupted and amalgamated with the Norman word "saler" after the conquest of 1066. The Norman word already meant "a container for salt". By the 1500s we had corrupted it further to "cellar" and without understanding that to say "salt cellar" was a bit of a redundancy since we were effectively saying "salt salt container".

 

[No gold in NY]

Beautiful piece. I would be proud to have it.

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