Wow; I’m jealous! This is probably my favorite hallmark, just because it’s so bizarre.
Your eyes are fine, because the mark is very nearly exactly what you see! It is taken from the canting (i.e., punning) arms of the German city of
Kröpelin (krüppel = “cripple”) and depicts a footless man with wooden blocks strapped to his shins, propelling himself with two wooden paddles!
Like I say — just bizarre!
The maker is Johann Christian Friedrich Schlick, born in Kröpelin on 9 Oct 1814, the son of silversmith Johann Friedrich Schlick and Caroline Dosten. He trained with his father and assumed his business upon the elder Schlick’s death in 1841. It is not known when Schlick the younger died, but it was sometime between 1875 (the last mention of him in Kröpelin records) and 1903 (when his widow is listed in the Kröpelin directory).
Both he and his father are listed in Wolfgang Scheffler’s
Goldschmiede Mittel- un Nordost Deutschlands (Kröpelin makers nos. 3 & 5, respectively) but the city mark was not discovered and identified until 1998, when it was reported in the August 1998 edition of
Weltkunst magazine.
Great find!
