Mod. silver cufflinks from France

[tamrock]

I picked these cufflinks up yesterday for under 5 dollars. They have French hallmarks with a purity mark of a crab, which I'm finding was used on a silver alloy of 80% from 1938 to 1962. They also have a word DIAL and all I'm finding online with other cufflinks marked DIAL is just some common gold plated ones no different than average SWANK cuffs that were sold or offered online with little info other than they come from France. I'm thinking DIAL might be a brand name such as Shank? What I can't identify is a diamond mark, which is the French silversmith makers mark. I've scanned through all the images on the 925/1000 silver marks site focusing on all that would fall in the timeframe of when I believe these where made trying to I.D. the maker of these. To me they appear to have been made within the 1950s - 1960s modernist era. The makers mark is very small and hard to get a good focused image with a phone cam and loupe, but hopefully it'll reveal enough for someone to figure out?

 

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[Drmad7]

Nice “Brutalist” or “Abstract” design! I don’t know anything about the marks, but these are nice and should sell for well above scrap. I’ll be following this post!

 

[tamrock]

Hard to say. The market for vintage cufflinks have been falling over the last 10 years. The last pair of silver ones I listed were made by Georg Jensen and what I thought might bring $150. to $200. topped out at $65. on an auction. I should of settled on a buy now price with those. Seems the cufflink collectors are becoming less and less these days. I still like them. Haven't worn a pair since the 1990s though. That was at a funeral.

 

[SDIceMan]

I did some sleuthing and I believe that diamond mark could be the maker’s mark for Charles Murat. Here are a couple of examples I found online along with your example for comparison:



The mark of Charles Murat, CM separated by a blackberry with two leaves, was registered in 1897. Maison Murat was situated on the rue des Archives in Paris.

 

[Red-Coat]

The ‘crab’ hallmark has been used on French silver (small items only) since 1838, so that doesn’t really help much on dating.

I agree the icon in the diamond lozenge of the maker mark is that of Charles Murat… a mulberry with two leaves, but the surrounding initials appear not to be the customary ‘CM’. Looks more like ‘JM’. Charles Murat’s son, Jacques Louis Georges Murat took over the business in 1889 and ultimately registered that mark on 3rd June 1897 in Paris, using his father’s initials ‘CM’. I don’t know if Jacques ever registered it with his own initials ‘JM’.

The company was active until around 1900 when it became “Maison Murat”, mainly producing silver tableware. There’s then a veritable labyrinth of partnerships and associations involving the Charles Murat business, Murat & Compagnie and other companies cumulating in the collective business being known as “Maison Murat”. In 1910 E. Olier & G. Caron bought several of Murat’s cutlery patterns and then seem to have been running that part of the business until 1936.

Meantime, the other parts of the business continued using the Murat mark but I think it’s not seen in association with the ‘DIAL’ mark until the 1940s/1950s and I haven’t seen it on anything other than cufflinks in gold plate or silver. This is from that period:

 

[tamrock]

Thanks people of treasurenet. Its always nice to have good information on a treasure find. It makes them all the more interesting.