Vintage Hand-Hammered Brass Orb Vase with Stepped Ring Neck & Fitted Collar, 11" x 7"

A heavy hand-hammered brass orb with a stepped ring neck, and a fitted brass collar that sits in the mouth.

The hammering runs across the whole body rather than sitting in a decorative band, and you can see and feel it on the inside of the neck as well as the outside — machine-pressed reproductions are smooth inside. At nearly five pounds it has real heft in the hand.

The collar clamps under the rim on four screws and narrows the opening. That's what makes a wide-mouthed vessel like this actually workable for dried branches or tall stems, and it's included.

There is no maker's mark anywhere on this piece — I looked hard. The only impression on the base is a circular tooling mark left by the lathe. Unmarked is the norm for hand-raised metalwork of this kind; the labour went into the hammering, not a stamp. What I can tell you is that the underside carries a bright wear ring where decades of sitting have taken the patina back to raw metal.