Lot Essay
Numerous jugs from this design of Iznik pottery with late 16th century European mounts are now in Western European collections and particularly in England. A jug with English silver-gilt mounts hallmarked 1586-87 AD on loan to the Ashmolean Museum with a similar stripe design gives a close comparable to our jug and indicates that the mounts were added soon after the pottery was made. Although there is no direct comparable for the chimera of the lid, an Iznik jug with parcel-gilt mounts in the Victoria and Albert Museum has a similar shell-shaped thumb piece and is dated circa 1580-85 (Europa und der Orient, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1989, pp.615-16). In their discussion of European mounts on Iznik pottery, Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby link the affluence of Iznik pottery to England in the 1580s and after with the negotiation of the first English capitulations treatise with the Ottoman Empire in 1580 (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, znik, pp. 269-72, London1989). For another jug of similar design see lot 177.