The 'Ker' Amen Glass

CIRCA 1745-1750

Details

The 'Ker' Amen Glass
Circa 1745-1750
The massive drawn-trumpet goblet with a plain stem enclosing an elongated tear above a folded conical foot, the bowl engraved in diamond-point with a crown above a mirror-monogram of the letters JR direct and reverse to form the Royal cypher of King James VIII, the figure 8 worked into the monogram at the base, flanked by the last four lines of the first verse of the Jacobite Anthem:

Send Him Victorious
Happy and Glorious
Soon to Reign Over Us
God Save The King

enclosed within a rectangular cartouche of calligraphic scrolls and including the word Amen reserved on an oval cartouche below the monogram
11 in. (29 cm.) high

Provenance

Descended through John Archibald Ker (1819-1915) from his grandfather James Ker (1750-1819) of Blackshiels, to Brigadier T.F.K. Howard and thence by descent.

Literature

R.J. Charleston and Geoffrey Seddon, '"Amen" Glasses, The Glass Circle, Number 5, p. 14, listed as no. 39.

Exhibited

Victoria and Albert Museum, loan, 1977-1992.

Lot Essay

According to family tradition James Ker of Blackshiels, a hamlet in the parish of Humbie, East Lothian some fifteen miles south-east of Edinburgh, and the original owner of the present goblet, acted as one of the bankers to Charles Edward Stuart, The Young Pretender (1720-1788), a position which led to his financial ruin after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The goblet passed from his son James Ker of Blackshiels (1750-1819) through his son James, to his son John Archibald Ker (1818-1915), his elder brother Captain James Ker (1817-1856) having been killed at the Battle of Inkermann. The glass then passed through the female line to Brigadier Thomas Farquharson Ker Howard (1899-1964) from whom it has descended to the present owner.

Other Amen glasses sold in these Rooms are the 'Burn-Murdoch', 4 June 1980, lot 153; the 'Breadalbane I', 25 November 1986, lot 123 and the 'Breadalbane II', 16 October 1990, lot 148.

More from CERAMICS & GLASS

View All