Quote:
Originally Posted by BMur
Now to Patbar's engraved guns? The pattern that I am seeing is clearly New York Style. By that I mean the engraving is vine style that is circular, and "Full Coverage". Very dense engraving that follows probably the most common pattern and style out there. This style is very attractive in my opinion but also extremely difficult to comprehend or differentiate between a factory engraving or contract engraving.
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That was my whole point ... trying to ascertain whether a gun was "factory engraved" based on the engraving style alone is going to be fruitless. The question of who commissioned the engraving is an economic question, not an artistic one.
Unless there's factory documentation for Patbar's particular gun, the only real guessing that can be done is whose shop the engraving came out of. And, like many things in the art world, the best we'll able to say is that it exhibits characteristics of Nimschke's shop, or Young's shop, or whomever's shop. Absent, of course, an engraver's signature.
(As an aside ... trained historians are careful not to talk about "proofs" in history. Records, like the people that recorded them, can lie. Historical evidence is always open to interpretation. Etcetera.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BMur
The attached photo style is the only style in antique cartridge Smiths that My studies confirm is a Factory engraved pattern. If you look closely at the pattern it is very unique. All of my lettered Smiths have this exact pattern engraving!
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Pretty gun, but it's not the only one (or the earliest one). I have a Model 1, 2nd Issue that (according to the factory records) was factory engraved (and was *not* shipped through Storrs in New York, to boot). It doesn't have the Nimschke-school design that I'm used to seeing on Model 1's, so it has been something of an enigma for me to research. I know of at least one or two other Model 1's that were factory engraved, and the one specific gun I'm thinking of has yet a different style.
Mike