Turkish (Ottoman Anatolia), Iznik, c. 1580–92. Mounts by an unidentified silversmith (mark: ‘IH’), London, 1592/3.
This jug decorated with red hyacinths and blue pomegranates was made in Iznik (Ottoman Anatolia) for the European market. It was exported to Elizabethan London where, in 1592/3, it was fitted with fashionable silver-gilt mounts. Ewer-shaped, it was actually meant for consuming ale or beer. As a French visitor remarked in 1558, the English drank beer ‘not out of glasses but from earthen pots with silver handles and covers & this even in houses of persons of middling fortune’.
Purchased from Mallet & Sons (18.11.1948) with the F. Leverton Harris Fund, and from the Albert Leopold Reckitt Bequest
Cat. no. 7
M.16-1948
