Vintage F.B. Rogers Footed Silverplate Sugar Bowl, c. 1905–1930

The Piece

A covered sugar bowl with a body drawn as a near-perfect sphere, lifted clear of the table on four cast feet that scroll outward from a shaped and pierced apron. The handles are cast rather than formed, each one capped where it meets the shoulder with a curl of acanthus. The lid rises in a high cone and finishes in a cast tulip finial, its petals folded around a small rosette at the base of the bud.

It is a piece built entirely out of curves. There is not a straight line anywhere on it, and the sphere sitting on four outswept feet gives it the slightly comic dignity of something balanced on tiptoe.

The plating has worn through across the whole belly and over the crown of the lid, leaving a mottled field of warm copper-gold broken by islands of near-black tarnish, while the cast feet, handles and finial have held their plate and stayed grey. The underside is struck TRADE MARK above a crown flanked by 18 and 83, with F.B. ROGERS SILVER CO beneath it and the model number 1224 below that.

History & Provenance

Rogers is the most contested name in American silverplate. The original Rogers brothers of Hartford began electroplating in the eighteen-forties and their name sold so reliably that for the rest of the century firm after firm attached some version of it to their own goods: Wm. Rogers, Rogers & Bro., 1847 Rogers Bros., Rogers Smith. F.B. Rogers was one of those firms, founded at Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts in 1883 and moved to Taunton three years later, where it spent almost two decades trading as the West Silver Company and making goods for yet another Rogers concern. New owners restored the F.B. Rogers name to its own output around 1904. It became a division of the National Silver Company in 1955 and was gone by the two-thousands.

One thing about the mark is worth stating plainly, because it is misread constantly. The 18 and the 83 flanking the crown are the year the firm was founded, not the year this bowl was made. That device stayed in use for the better part of a century, so a piece carrying it can date from almost anywhere across that span, and any listing that reads the mark as an 1883 manufacture date is wrong.

What the mark does give is a firm floor. A bowl struck F.B. ROGERS SILVER CO belongs to the period after the name was restored to the firm's own production around 1904, not to the West Silver years before it. The number 1224 is a catalogue model number and carries no date. Beyond that the evidence thins: the heavily cast feet, handles and finial belong to the ornamented revival hollowware the American plate houses were turning out before the plainer mid-century lines displaced it, which is a softer argument than the floor. On that evidence it is offered as c. 1905 to 1930.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

The wear is the reason to buy it. A fully plated example of this bowl is a perfectly ordinary grey object. This one has spent long enough being handled that the silver has gone from the belly and the copper underneath has come up in a mottled gold that no finish could be applied to imitate, and against the black of the remaining tarnish it looks less like tableware than like something excavated.

It has real presence for its size, because the sphere on four splayed feet takes up visual room that a plain cylinder never would. Put it on a mantel, a bar cart, a bookshelf or a bathroom counter, fill it with matches, cotton, rings or nothing, and it will be the object guests pick up.