Pair of Unglazed Terracotta Side-Spouted Ewers, Graduated, Wheel-Thrown with Strap Handles and Collared Mouths, c. 1920–1939

The Piece

Two unglazed clay ewers in graduated sizes, made to stand together.

Each has a full round belly drawn up into a long narrow neck that finishes in a thick collared mouth, a heavy ring of clay standing out at the top like the lip of a bottle.

A tubular spout projects straight out from the shoulder of each, short and slightly upturned, and a strap handle arcs from the collar down to the swell of the body — drawn out by hand, flattened, and pressed on at both ends.

Both stand on a turned spreading foot, and the bases are flat and cleanly cut.

The surface is bare clay: pale buff, matt and slightly chalky, with fine throwing rings spiralling up the whole body where the potter's fingers rose through the wall. There is no glaze anywhere.

History & Provenance

The side-spouted jug is one of the oldest vessel forms that still looks modern. The Metropolitan Museum holds a terracotta side-spouted jug from Minoan Crete, dated about 2600–2400 BCE, which the museum describes as “one of the most characteristic” shapes of the Early Minoan II period — nicknamed a teapot with an exaggerated spout. Four and a half thousand years later the arrangement is unchanged: belly for volume, neck to pour from, spout to aim, handle to hold.

Leaving the clay unglazed is not an omission. It is the working principle. A porous unglazed body lets water seep slowly through the wall and evaporate off the outside, and evaporation carries heat away with it — the vessel sweats, and the water inside gets cold. The Spanish botijo is the most studied version of this: placed somewhere warm with dry moving air, it can drop the water temperature by as much as 10°C — 18°F — in an hour. The physics turned out to be complicated enough that Spanish scientists in the 1990s wrote a pair of differential equations to describe it. The oldest known botijo is Early Bronze Age, from a site at Beniaján occupied between about 1700 and 1500 BC.

Vessels like these belong to the replica trade that grew out of the Grand Tour. Travellers to Greece, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean bought terracotta made in the ancient forms — not represented as excavated, simply made the old way: on a wheel, unglazed, by potters in places where the shapes had never gone out of production. The trade ran strongly through the nineteenth century and on through the interwar decades, and it is where most classical-form terracotta in American and British houses came from.

Both are hand-thrown rather than moulded — the rings run continuously up the wall, the two are similar but not identical, and the handles are pulled and applied by hand.

There is no maker's mark, stamp, signature, label or country-of-origin mark on either piece, and they are offered unattributed. Dated on the hand throwing, the classical replica form, and the dry ingrained character of the bisque with its soft-edged losses and soiling worked down into the throwing rings: c. 1920–1939. The form itself is thousands of years older and carries no date of its own.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A graduated pair does something a single vessel cannot: it makes a composition on its own, with no styling required.

Set the two together on a console, a mantel, a kitchen shelf or the end of a dining table and the difference in height does all the work. Pale unglazed clay against dark wood, painted furniture, stone or plaster is one of the most reliable contrasts in decorating, and it belongs equally to a farmhouse kitchen, a plaster-walled hallway and a very modern room.

They are good with flowers and better with branches. The narrow collared mouths hold a few tall stems upright without a frog or tape — eucalyptus, olive, pampas, dried grasses, a single flowering branch — and the long necks mean the arrangement can be sparse and still look deliberate.

The shape is also the quiet pleasure. Somebody threw these on a wheel; you can follow the rings up the wall with a thumb, and the handles were pulled out of wet clay by hand rather than stuck on from a mould.

A note on care, and unglazed clay has one rule that surprises people. Do not fill these with water and leave them. The wall is porous by design — that is the whole point of the material — so water will seep through, darken the body permanently and leave a ring on whatever they are standing on. For fresh flowers, put a glass jar or a florist's vial inside; for dried stems, nothing is needed.

Do not wash them and never put them in a dishwasher. Bare bisque absorbs anything it touches, and detergent, oil and soap go in and stay in. Dust them with a soft dry brush; lift a mark with a clean dry eraser or fine abrasive sponge used very lightly, and accept that some marks will not come out.

Keep them out of freezing conditions — a porous body that has taken up damp will split when it freezes — and lift them by the body rather than the handle or the neck, which are the thinnest parts.