Tall Flask

Location: probably Bohemia

Materials: heavy ruby glass, blown and tooled, with enamelled decoration and gilding

Dimensions: height 50cm 

Accession Number: GLS 609

Other Notes:

This is a rather free copy of an early 14th century enamelled Mamluk flask acquired by Baron Gustave de Rothschild in Paris in 1864 and illustrated in Eugène-Victor Collinot and Adalbert de Beaumont’s Ornements de la Perse, a section of a 19th-century encyclopaedia of oriental decorative arts. There, as on the present piece, however, it is misidentified as ‘art sassanide’.

Ruby glass was a well-known 19th-century Bohemian speciality and this flask was very probably produced in the factory of J. & L. Lobmeyr at Adolfov in southern Bohemia.

Bibliography:

S.M. Goldstein et al, Glass. From Sasanian Antecedents to European Imitations, The Nasser D Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, volume XV, London 2005, cat.339, pp.316–17.
J.M. Rogers, The Arts of Islam. Masterpieces from the Khalili Collection, London 2010, cat.461, pp. 378–9.