Help, Need to identify origin, period of manufacture!!!!

Hello Rob, and welcome to myArmoury.
There's not much to work with in your first post... ;) Why don't you take and upload some photos, talk about where, when, and how you acquired this targe, and relate any information or hearsay that came with it? While we wait on that, you might also want to read myArmoury's article The Shield: Its Use and Development. If it's a true Scottish targe, or if you're just interested, you can find some good books on the subject in this list.
Cheers,
-GLL

EDIT: mislinked shield article, sorry! It should work now. -GLL

Thanks for the reply . Tried to add photo, thought I had, my image was to big, trying to figure out how to add image. Never had problems adding images before??Help!

Hi again Rob,
Ah, thought that might be the case. There's a forum attachment guide, wherein it states:

Quote:

How do I resize my images so that I can attach them? You must use an application on your computer to resize your images to fit within the limits imposed by the forum. There are many freeware programs available for such things. For Windows users, we suggest a free and easy to use application that resizes and does other imaging tasks for you called Visualizer Photo Resizer. It has a helpful tutorial available. If you are using Windows XP, you can also use Microsoft PowerToys for an even easier solution.

Note that another solution is to host your full size images elsewhere (on personal webspace) and create links to them; this is something that if you do not already know how to do, I would suggest you ignore it and just resize the images as above, which will probably be easier and faster in the short term.

The allowed types of image attachments are gif, jpeg, jpg, or png format, with a size maximum of 125 KB each. You can attach a maximum of 8 images per post.

Hope that helps,
-GLL

Enclosed are pics of an 18" Solid Leather TARGE. The appliques are metal. There are designs on the face and edges of the item. They appear to have been hand painted in a gold color. On the inside is a 6"x6" red fabric cushion attached to small iron rings that are held in place by the front metal appliques. Apparantly the interior metal rings once were used for attaching the missing hand holding or arm holding devices. Is this TARGE an original or a recent replica?

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This is an Indo Persian shield called a dhal made from either rhino or waterbuffalo hide I would guess. These shields we in use in India/Persia until nearly the end of the 19th century. It looks like a nice example of the type although age is tought to say given how late these were in use.

Allen is right on the money. Dahls are pretty easy to find, often on e-bay, but buyer beware, a lot of exageration or outright misrepresentation seems to be common with indo persian arms and armour on the web these days, with many modern bieces held out as antiques. Hard to say from pictures, but yours looks quite nice and appears authentic. You can sometimes see info on these at the oriental arms website, as occassionally they have them for sale and are reputable.

Where/how you acquired it may provide some help or clue regarding its authenticity or age. How'd you come by it?

Terry, my mom was quite an early american and old english antique furniture collector. She passed last year and this item was one of many, that I was left in her estate. Of course, growing up around antiques, I am somewhat a collector of authentic old english and american pieces. This one stumped me! Thanks for the info, will follow it up further. Just email the museum in London regarding this piece. Who knows?? Thanks, Rob