Drinking cup, clear brown glass with enamelled German text in white, Germany,1650-1699

Low drinking bowl in clear brown glass, with squashed sides. Ornamental bands and German text in white enamel and traces of gilding on the rim.

Bought from the Bernal Collection.

Provenance

Ralph Bernal (1783-1854) was a renowned collector and objects from his collection are now in museums across the world, including the V&A. He was born into a Sephardic Jewish family of Spanish descent, but was baptised into the Christian religion at the age of 22. Bernal studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and subsequently became a prominent Whig politician. He built a reputation for himself as a man of taste and culture through the collection he amassed and later in life he became the president of the British Archaeological Society. Yet the main source of income which enabled him to do this was the profits from enslaved labour.

In 1811, Bernal inherited three sugar plantations in Jamaica, where over 500 people were eventually enslaved. Almost immediately, he began collecting works of art and antiquities. After the emancipation of those enslaved in the British Caribbean in the 1830s, made possible in part by acts of their own resistance, Bernal was awarded compensation of more than £11,450 (equivalent to over £1.5 million today). This was for the loss of 564 people enslaved on Bernal's estates who were classed by the British government as his 'property'. They included people like Antora, and her son Edward, who in August 1834 was around five years old (The National Archives, T 71/49). Receiving the money appears to have led to an escalation of Bernal's collecting.

When Bernal died in 1855, he was celebrated for 'the perfection of his taste, as well as the extent of his knowledge' (Christie and Manson, 1855). His collection was dispersed in a major auction during which the Museum of Ornamental Art at Marlborough House, which later became the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), was the biggest single buyer.

Olga Drahotova was not certain, but Norbert Jopek considers inscription OK
Dieter Schaich (Munich) saw this piece on 8/9/2003 during the AIHV conference in London and pointed out that there are two similar pieces in the museum at Weimar.

This seventeenth-century drinking cup has an enamelled inscription in German. It is a poem referring to drinking and sexual intercourse. The shape of the cup possibly also has a sexual connotation as the texts on all known examples of this type refer to drinking and making love.

1837-1855