Wine cooler

Object Type
Wine was generally drunk chilled irrespective of its colour in 18th-century Britain. One method of chilling it was to stand the bottles in which it was generally served in bucket-shaped containers, known as wine coolers, filled with crushed ice. Blocks of ice were available all the year round from specialist merchants, who imported it from Scandinavia and the Baltic ports; alternatively, ice could be obtained from frozen ponds during winter and stored underground in ice-houses. By the date this piece was made, small individual wine coolers could be placed on the dining table, or, on less formal occasions, on the floor behind a diner's chair. Larger wine coolers like this one were probably placed on a side table, with the wine served by servants.

Materials & Making
The 'diced' decoration on this piece was produced before it was fired by cutting away parts of the surface on an engine-turning lathe. Unlike a simple lathe, which spins the worked object on a fixed axis, an engine-turning lathe with one cam or more imparts an alternating or variable motion to the object. The white Jasperware reliefs were applied after the engine-turning, and the interior was polished with gem-workers' abrasives.