Collecting Vintage Pure Sterling Silver Purses, Ladies Handbags or Miniature Silver Bags

        Gentlemen and elegant ladies have always loved and admired silver. The clean gleam attracts everyone, and the myriad forms pretty much all
appeal to us. People wear plenty of it every day. Naturally, when someone goes antiquiting either on Internet or at a local Antiques Shop Street, eyes are caught by the shine of silver lurking in the showcases. Lovely little silver purses from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco Periods and Eames Era are especially appealing to delicate ladies. They can be gently used sometimes, you can take it out for the evening to show off to your friends. Imagine while sipping a drink, you can pull an Art Deco silver vanity case out of the soft kid lining of the mesh purse you have just acquired to check your lipstick. Some of the tiniest purses are almost miracles of space engineering, how on Earth can a small, slim case about the size of a skinny compact
hold three compartments, a silver mechanical pencil, a celluloid notepad, and a mirror? And the types with spring-loaded coin holders are so
intriguing... A relic from the old times when carrying coins could actually buy you something! Suspended from a little finger-chain, they look so elegant and cute!

        The varieties of purses are myriad. Dance purses, necessaires, minaudieres, vanity cases, compacts, coin purses, carryalls, card cases, and more. Plenty of manufacturers made such novelties. Makers are of great importance, but often design and condition are more important to collectors. Amongst being most desirable we can notice Unger Bros. and Tiffany & Co. First made baroque-styled, deeply embossed designs with motifs similar to cavorting putti, nude maidens, rich looking backgrounds. Tiffany's designs tended to be more sleek and restrained, classy and with understated elegance. Gorham Sterling also produced incredibly rich and fabulous silver smalls/compact cases, as well as purses and purse frames, though probably
they are well known as flatware and serving-piece maker. Kerr produced lovely items in the Victorian highly ornamented style, often you'll find
figural or floral ladies belt buckles by Kerr, with their hatchet shaped mark. If you're lucky you would run across a dance purse by Kerr their embossed designs are quite well done and very Nouveau!

        Daniel Low was a store that commissioned some very nice Art Nouveau designed purses, judging from pictures from their catalogues. Presumably, their ladies wares were not always embossed with the company's name, or they were marked by Daniel Low as well as by Gorham, for example. Incidentally, same company sold Sterling overlaid Steuben Perfumes, as evidenced by their catalogue of year 1910. Whiting&Davis did some excellent Sterling silver mesh purses, some of those with desirable Cathedral top. They made the finest mesh, which they termed as 'baby fine', with miniscule machine-made links. The Whiting&Davis sterling purses are quite collectable, as well as their Deco enameled 'flapper' style purses.

        Also the hallmarked English silver is quite desirable; the hallmarks on English sterling can tell you when and where an item was made. In America, the Stamp Act of 1906 standardized the requirements of sterling silver to 925 parts silver, and required all items to be marked as such. Before that there were plenty of unmarked smalls. It's difficult to say whether a piece is more or less desirable with initials engraved. Sometimes you're lucky enough to run across your own initials on a piece, but not very often. The fonts used were so highly stylized that sometimes they're just illegible, and could really be anything. But the beauty of the engraving is sometimes just exciting in and of itself, and adds charm to the piece. It is true that an antique wouldn't have your initials on it anyway; it would have your grandma's. However, if a purse is engraved, say, 'Isabel', across the top, it will always belong to Isabel. Though plenty of pieces have blank initial plates.You would never see a silver purse reproduced. Some of the best reference books you can fine are Handbags, 3rd Edition, Revised and Updated by Roseann Ettlinger, the beginning of the book by the same author, Compacts and Smoking Accessories 2nd Edition, and Silver Novelties in the Gilded Age by Deborah Crosby.

        Of course, there are so many other areas of collecting sterling silver smalls, besides the purses that catch our eyes. From Matchsafes Vestas to Lorgnettes (hand-held Opera and other spectacles), there were so many quasi-functional and highly decorative silver items created in the Victorian era, so that there is something for everyone! :))

        We hope you were happy with this conversation, please give us your appraisal !