Vintage 1952 Etched Brass Goblet Chalice 🏺 Indian Bright-Cut Engraving, India

Description

View Vintage 1952 Etched Brass Goblet Chalice 🏺 Indian Bright-Cut Engraving, India with current marketplace pricing, condition, product images and item details. It's an old technique: it first appears around 1775 and had its peak in British and Irish silver from the 1770s into the 1830s. Flip it over and there's a second story waiting under the foot: two scratched initials and the word INDIA, put there by hand before this piece ever left the country. 🏺 Vintage 1952 Etched Brass Goblet Chalice -- Indian Bright-Cut Engraving, INDIA Mark Under the Foot Offered here is a vintage etched brass goblet out of India, a 1952 piece. It's a full chalice shape -- flared cup, waisted stem with a center knop, wide domed foot -- and the cup is covered edge to edge in hand-cut bright-cut engraving. Flip it over and there's a second story waiting under the foot: two scratched initials and the word INDIA, put there by hand before this piece ever left the country. 📋 The Specifics at a Glance 🔹 Form: chalice-form goblet -- flared cup, waisted stem with central knop, round domed foot. 🔹 Material: brass. 🔹 Decoration: all-over hand bright-cut engraving, fan and shell motifs, matching band on the foot. 🔹 Base mark: hand-scratched initials (they look like B.K.) followed by INDIA, inside the hollow foot. 🔹 Origin: India -- the scratched INDIA is a Tariff Act of 1930 export mark, not a later owner's note. 🔹 Date: 1952. 🔹 Finish: honest, unpolished vintage patina. 🔹 Quantity: one goblet -- the one photographed. 📝 The Mark Under the Foot Inside the hollow foot are two scratched initials that look like B.K., followed by the word INDIA, scratched in that same rough hand. That's not a later owner's note. Section 304 of the U.S. Tariff Act of 1930 required every import to be marked "as legibly, indelibly, and permanently as the nature of the article permits" with its country of origin, in English, before it could enter the country. A small workshop piece like this one wasn't stamped at the factory -- someone scratched INDIA into it by hand, tucked inside the hollow foot, to clear customs. It's the export mark, put on when it left India, and it's the one piece of direct writing this goblet carries about where it came from. 🎨 Bright-Cut Engraving, Explained The technique covering this cup has a name: bright-cut. Instead of a flat scratched line, a bright-cut graver bevels a faceted furrow into the metal, angled so each cut throws light back at its own angle -- pack enough of those together, as they are here, and the surface shimmers and shifts as the piece turns. It's an old technique: it first appears around 1775 and had its peak in British and Irish silver from the 1770s into the 1830s. India's own brass trade borrowed the name for its version of that same flashing, faceted cut -- brass instead of silver, same idea, cut by hand stroke by stroke. 🌍 Moradabad, India's Brass City A great deal of India's engraved export brass came out of Moradabad, and it's worth knowing the background. Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh, was founded in 1625 by Rustam Khan, a governor under the emperor Shah Jahan, and named for Shah Jahan's son Prince Murad Baksh. Locally called Pital Nagri -- "Brass City" -- it has exported engraved, embossed and cast brassware since the East India Company days and remains India's leading metal-handicraft export center today. Bright-cut engraving like this goblet's is one of the signature techniques that tradition is known for. 📅 About the 1952 1952 falls right at the close of India's first general election as an independent republic, which ran from October 1951 into February 1952, two years after the Republic was declared, a nice bit of history behind a goblet from the same year. 🔍 Condition, Honestly This is the one goblet pictured -- not a stand-in. It carries an honest, unpolished patina, darker down in the recesses of the engraving, with a few small dings at the rim and around the edge of the foot, and dark oxidation spots underneath. The engraving itself remains crisp and fully legible across the cup and foot. A US quarter is shown beside it in two of the photos for scale. A genuine vintage Indian brass goblet, hand-engraved top to bottom, carrying its own country-of-origin mark scratched into the foot. Condition: Used. Category: Collectibles › Metalware › Brass.

Object Type

Goblet

Material

Brass

Country of Origin

India