Robert Ensko
(1855-1934) American silver expert
Robert F. Ensko I (October 17, 1855 – May 13, 1934) also known as Robert Ensko Sr. was a Manhattan silver expert and author of Makers of Early American Silver in 1915. The book in its multiple editions has become the standard reference work for antique American silver.
Silver
Robert started a family business of making modern reproductions of antique silver in New York and he authored a book: Makers of Early American Silver in 1915. Joslin Hall writes:
In this work Ensko was attempting to list known and unknown makers of American silver, their locality and working dates. He lists marks where they are known, and ... concedes the honor of being the first book of marks of American silversmiths to [the] French because Ensko does not actually picture reproductions of the marks themselves, but simply lists them. He also includes several lists of unknown marks, including a group of pieces from the Clearwater Collection, and asks the readers to send him any information they might have. An exceedingly interesting seminal study of American silversmiths.
His son Stephen Guernsey Cook Ensko (1896–1969) would eventually publish three more editions of the book, and his granddaughter Dorothea Charlotte Ensko (1920-2014) would publish an additional one.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Ensko” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.