Object Type
In the 19th century, jugs became common at meal times and for serving cold drinks, wine and hot beverages such as chocolate and hot water. This jug has ivory plugs in the handle so that it could be used to serve hot liquids without the handle becoming too hot to hold. In a trade catalogue of 1885, the manufacturer Elkington & Co. advertised silver claret or water jugs for between £11 and £14, depending upon style and decoration.

People
This jug was made by the London manufacturing silversmiths Charles Reily and George Storer who were in partnership from 1829 and are known to have made other silver which directly copied antique pottery.

Design
This jug copies the form of an ancient Greek pottery ewer (oinochoe) illustrated in a catalogue of Sir William Hamilton's collection published by d'Hancarville from1766 to 1777. Reily and Storer used the catalogue to produce other copies of Greek pottery in silver. The art of ancient Greece and Rome had an enormous influence on the form and ornament of late 18th-century decorative arts but at that period silversmiths borrowed and adapted rather than replicating a particular item. In the early 19th century copying a classical object in its entirety became popular. The Royal Goldsmiths, Rundells, made several copies of the celebrated Portland Vase in the 1820s. In the 1840s Elkingtons, the pioneers of the new metalworking technique of electrotyping, which could copy accurately and cheaply, employed a Danish architect, Benjamin Schlick to identify antiquities suitable for copying.