Smoking guns and instruments of deception
In January 2024, The Goldsmiths’ Company received an extraordinary gift. Chip deMatteo, a silversmith from Virginia in the US, arrived at Goldsmiths’ Hall and presented me with two pieces of antique silver and an old tin that had once contained packets of Phillies cigars. The writing on the tin proclaimed them to be ‘America’s greatest value cigar’, which, at five cents each, they surely were.
But instead of cigars, the tin contained 42 steel punches, each cut with an 18th-century London hallmark, a date letter or a sponsor’s (otherwise known as maker’s) mark.
But instead of cigars, the tin contained 42 steel punches, each cut with an 18th-century London hallmark, a date letter or a sponsor’s (otherwise known as maker’s) mark. Also included were two pieces of silver – a mug dating from 1759 and a little salver dating from 1787 – which had been struck with some of the very same punches that were sitting in the tin. The answer to the question of how such significant artefacts can have ever escaped Goldsmiths’ Hall is that they didn’t: the punches, mug and salver are all fakes, made in the 20th century and marked to deceive the unwary collector. In crime-fiction terms, therefore, the gift was both the body and the smoking gun.
The story behind this gift is that Chip deMatteo is a thirdgeneration silversmith with antique British silver in his blood. His father, William L. deMatteo, spent much of his life at Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum in Virginia, making replica wares and demonstrating historic techniques to visitors. A generation back, Chip’s grandfather, William G. deMatteo, ran a commercial workshop. He also made replica wares, but sometimes disguised them as the real thing by the addition of spurious hallmarks. These seem to have been made to the order of one or two New York antique dealers, who, it appears, passed them on to their clients as genuine articles.
The marks on the punches are very well cut and more or less convincing on casual inspection. Nowadays, the availability of high-resolution photographs of genuine marks against which to compare them makes them quite easy to detect, but in days gone by they would easily have passed muster.
This is not the first time that the spotlight has fallen on makers of fake English domestic silver. In 2008 a ‘master faker’, Peter Ashley-Russell, was convicted of making and falsely marking a large number of ostensibly 17th-century English spoons and other items of antique plate, and sent to prison. But the most famous case of all, going back to the end of the 19th century, came to light when a huge cache of fake English silver was intercepted in the hands of a London dealer by the name of Reuben Lyon.
Like the deMatteo wares, it was their very ordinariness that gave Lyon’s pieces their cover: appearing to date from a period from which large quantities of genuine wares survived, they enjoyed a strong market but did not command high prices. The Goldsmiths’ Company and the antiques trade were rattled by the fakes discovered in what became known as the Lyon and Twinam case, and raised public awareness of the issue by publishing details of all the marks found on the seized goods before they were melted down. But the actual punches – the smoking guns – were never found.
Quite how many deMatteo forgeries are in circulation is not known, but the punches are likely to prove of great value as a benchmark in future cases to come before the Goldsmiths’ Hallmark Authentication Committee (formerly known as the Antique Plate Committee). For whereas in the past we have concluded from time to time that this or that set of marks is spurious, now we will be able to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt not only that the marks are spurious but that the item on which they are struck was made in New York City during the early 20th century.
The Goldsmiths’ Company is enormously grateful to Chip deMatteo for this public-spirited gift.
Written by Dr Timothy Schroder for The Goldsmiths’ Review 2023-24 | Photography by Richard Valencia