A 17thC German Antique Bellarmine Stoneware Jug, Frechen, Circa 1650

A German Rhenish salt-glazed stoneware jug, known in the English trade as a "Bellarmine" and in its native German as a Bartmannkrug — a "bearded-man jug" — after the grotesque applied mask that gives the type its unmistakable character. The English name derives from a popular, probably apocryphal, tradition connecting the grimacing bearded mask to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Catholic polemicist reviled by Protestant England in the religious controversies of the late 16th and 17th centuries; whatever its true origin, the nickname has stuck fast in English-language cataloguing ever since.

Of compressed globular form rising to a tall cylindrical neck, the jug is applied high on the neck with a sprig-moulded bearded mask, rendered here with a schematic, deeply incised beard rather than the fuller, more naturalistic modelling of earlier 16th- and early-17th-century examples — a coarsening of style typical of Frechen's later production, as the workshops turned increasingly to the bulk export trade that carried these vessels by the hundred thousand down the Rhine to Amsterdam and on to England, the Low Countries, and across the Atlantic. Below the mask, the belly bears a stamped circular medallion of swirled rosette form; by the mid-17thC the medallions pressed onto Frechen wares had become largely debased and generic — stock ornamental stamps loosely descended from earlier civic and armorial devices rather than meaningful heraldry — and the present example belongs firmly within that decorative tradition rather than reading as an identifiable coat of arms.

The surface throughout is heavily oxidised and pitted beneath the characteristic mottled iron-brown salt glaze, with mineral encrustation to the lower body and foot — a degree of surface change more consistent with long burial or immersion than with a piece kept continuously on a domestic shelf, and in keeping with the recovered and excavated wares that appear to have formed part of this same sale. An old collector's label to the base is inscribed "C1650 / No. 1763."

Provenance: Germany. Mid-17th-Century.

Material: Salt-glazed stoneware.

Condition: Small nicks and losses to the rim, consistent with age and use; the surface showing heavy oxidation and encrustation throughout, as noted above — adding to, rather than detracting from, the piece's evident age.

Height: 9 in (23cm)