Daher Easter Tin, Oval Lidded Container Lithographed with a Rabbit and Spring Bulbs on Red and White Stripe, English-Made for Daher of Long Island City, c. 1963–1980

The Piece

A small oval tin with a lift-off lid, lithographed rather than painted, in a colour scheme that is doing more work than it first appears. The body is white, banded with narrow red stripes, and between every pair of stripes sits a small red sprig device repeated all the way around. It is a nineteenth-century confectioner's pattern — the striped ticking that biscuit and sweet tins used for a hundred years — and it is there to make the lid read as a picture in a frame.

The lid carries the whole scene. A rabbit sits upright with its arms wrapped around a large decorated egg, ears up, facing out, and behind it a spring border runs to the rim — white narcissus with orange centres, red and orange tulips, and one blue bell-shaped bloom, all against a pale sky. The drawing is commercial illustration of a very particular period: clean outline, flat colour laid inside it, a single dark line to model the ear and the haunch, no shading to speak of. It was made to survive being printed on metal at speed, and it has.

The tinplate holds its shape, the lid seats properly on the rolled rim and lifts off cleanly, and the interior is bright. The base is embossed rather than printed — struck into the metal itself, which is why it is still perfectly legible after sixty years of whatever this tin has held.

History & Provenance

The mark on the base reads DESIGNED BY DAHER / LONG ISLAND · N.Y. / 11101 / CONTAINER MADE IN ENGLAND, and it answers the obvious question precisely: the tin itself was made in England. “Container” is the object in your hands. Daher, in Long Island City, did the design and the importing; an English tinplate works did the printing and the forming.

That was the whole business model, and it was not a compromise. Britain had been the world's tinplate printer since the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the postwar decades the English decorated-tin trade was still the one American giftware houses went to when they wanted offset lithography on metal done properly. Daher designed for the American market and had the work executed where the presses were.

The mark also dates the tin, and unusually for an unmarked-era object it dates it from two directions at once. The company began in 1952 as Daher Limited, manufacturing all of its tins in England; in 1980 it was renamed The Tin Box Company of America and moved production to Hong Kong. An England-marked Daher tin therefore cannot be later than 1980. And the mark carries a ZIP code — 11101 — which cannot be earlier than 1 July 1963, when the United States Post Office introduced the system. The window closes to roughly 1963 to 1980 on the base of the tin alone, with no guessing from style.

One small correction to a thing the mark says. “Long Island” is Daher's own shorthand; ZIP 11101 is Long Island City, which is in Queens, in New York City, and not on Long Island in the sense most people mean. That is the company's abbreviation, not an error on this tin, and it appears the same way on everything they marked.

There is no separate maker's mark for the English works, which is normal — the printer's name almost never appears on trade-designed tins of this kind, because the tin was sold under the designer's name and the factory was a subcontractor.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Holiday decorating usually means buying things that have no life for the other eleven months. This one does. It is a lidded container that happens to have a rabbit on it, so it earns a shelf in March and keeps it in September — a red and white stripe with a spring garden on the lid reads as cottage pattern long before it reads as Easter.

It is also the right scale for the jobs nobody has a good container for: hair pins on a dresser, seed packets on a potting bench, tea bags beside a kettle, receipts, stamps, buttons, small change, a set of keys by a door. Tin does not absorb odour and does not stain, which is more than can be said for the basket it would otherwise be.

And a lithographed tin is one of the few genuinely affordable ways to put a piece of mid-century commercial illustration into a room. That rabbit was drawn by a working artist for a press run, and the flat colour and hard outline it needed to survive printing are exactly what make it read well from across a kitchen.

A note on care and use. We would not use this for food in direct contact. Mid-century lithographic inks and the lacquers used to line tinplate were not made to any modern food-contact standard, and there is no way to know from the outside what the interior coating is. Line it with paper or a bag if you want to keep biscuits or tea in it, or simply use it for dry non-food things, which is what most of these are doing now. Never put it in a dishwasher and never submerge it — tinplate rusts from the seam and the underside of the rim first, where you cannot see it, and water that gets in will not come out. Wipe it with a barely damp cloth, dry it immediately, and keep it out of direct sun, which will pull the reds and yellows down over time. Do not use any abrasive, cream cleaner or metal polish on it; the decoration is printed, it sits on the surface, and it will come off.