Lot #53: C.1910 Edwardian Signed Harry Atkins {England} Silver Plated Egg Cruet Four Removeable Ball-Footed Cups

Sound clean original condition Cruet 6" x 6" egg cups 2" x 2" indeed a hand holding them. What good eyes you have! Not many people notice that. Looks like this, correct? http://www.silvercollection.it/atkinsbros22.jpg This mark was used from the last quarter of the 1800s until 1925. This is a venerable old Sheffield company called Harry Atkins or Atkins Brothers (silversmiths) Ltd. the HA ES FA are the initials of the three brothers that ran the company during the second half of the 1800s, namely Harry Wright Atkin (HA), Edward Thomas Atkin (EA) and Frank Shaw Atkin (FA) although the firm had its origins in the mid 1700s. They were located at***** Sheffield. It is now part of C.J.Vander. The EPNS stands for Electro Plated Nickel Silver, a base metal alloy that is predominately nickel to give it a silver color, covered in a thin layer of silver that is applied by electrolysis, a technique pioneered by another great Sheffield maker, Elkington in the 1840s and adopted almost immediately by all the other old Sheffield plate makers as a much cheaper and less time consuming method of producing silver coated items. Old Sheffield plate was an a laborious but highly effective eighteenth century method of "heat-sandwiching" a filling of copper between two very thin sheets of silver and then using that as a plated metal for making a hollowware that looked almost exactly like its solid silver counterpart and at a fraction of the cost of expensive silver. When electroplating of silver came along it made this process even cheaper and the old Sheffield plate making died out. Your set, dating from the first quarter of the 20th century. If you saw it for sale in an antique shop it would have a retail value of about 175.0 Dimensions: Cruet 6" x 6" egg cups 2" x 2" Pickup category timeslot {A}