Iznik jug with English mounts

3D Model

This wheel-thrown fritware jug with ‘sealing-wax’ red hyacinths and cobalt blue pomegranates was made in Iznik (Western Anatolia), a renowned ceramics centre during the Ottoman Empire. It’s characteristic of late sixteenth-century production: the bright red colour was only used from 1560 onwards.

The jug was exported to Elizabethan London where, in 1592/3, it was fitted with fashionable silver-gilt mounts to protect its edges. Although it’s shaped like a jug, it was actually meant for drinking 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 and this even in houses of persons of middling fortune”.

The sliver mount has been pricked with the initials ‘E T’. These are almost certainly the initials of Elizabeth Tollemache, a very powerful and well-educated woman, who lived at Ham House, Surrey from 1655 until her death in 1699.

Created for BBC Civilisations AR App.