West German Cobalt and Gilt Relief Landsknecht Stoneware Flask, Stopper, c. 1950–1975

The Piece

A West German relief-molded stoneware liquor flask in the Westerwald taste, the small handled bottle with a stopper that the Rhineland potteries made for schnapps and liqueur in the decades after the war. The body is a squat, shouldered bottle with a short cylindrical neck and a scrolled loop handle at the shoulder, molded all over in high relief and glazed in the Westerwald palette of gray cream washed with cobalt blue. Each face carries a deep cartouche glazed in glossy cobalt black, framed by raised rococo scrolls picked out in bright gold, and in each cartouche stands a figure in white relief out of the sixteenth century: a Landsknecht in slashed doublet, puffed trunk hose and a plumed hat, one raising a cup to his mouth, another with a drum at his hip and a pike, the swaggering soldiers of the Renaissance that German potters have put on their drinking vessels since the 1500s. Between the cartouches run molded ribs of flowers and acanthus, and bands of gilt circle the neck and the shoulder. The stopper is a gadrooned ceramic knob in the same cream and cobalt with a gilt ring and a cobalt and white roundel on top, set on a tapered natural cork.

The flask is sound and complete, with no chips, cracks or repairs. The cobalt and the gilding are bright, with light rubbing to the gold on the high points of the scrolls and the neck rings; the interior is clean and the neck shows a little glaze pooling at the lip. The cork is the old one, dry and crumbling at the top edge, and seats firmly in the neck; it can be replaced with a standard tapered cork if the flask is to be used.

History & Provenance

The gray and cobalt stoneware of the Westerwald, the pottery district of the Rhineland around Höhr-Grenzhausen, has been made since the sixteenth century, and its vocabulary of relief figures, scrolling foliage and cobalt washed grounds was revived in the nineteenth century by potteries such as Merkelbach, Marzi and Remy, Gerz and Simon Peter Gerz, who turned it to steins, jugs and flasks for the German and export markets. After the Second World War the same houses supplied the souvenir and gift trade with a brighter, glossier version, glazed rather than salt-glazed and heightened with liquid gold, in which the Landsknecht and the tavern scene reappeared on flasks made to hold the regional schnapps that soldiers and tourists carried home. This flask belongs to that production, with its glossy glaze, its gilt-edged cartouches and its molded ceramic stopper on a cork.

The flask is offered as an unattributed West German piece. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the molded cream stoneware body under a glossy glaze with cobalt wash, the over-glaze liquid gold gilding, and the ceramic-topped cork stopper are all consistent with manufacture between about 1950 and 1975.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a flask for a bar cart, a bookshelf or a kitchen windowsill, small enough to tuck among glasses and bottles and busy enough to hold its own there. The cobalt and gold catch the light, the little soldiers reward a close look, and the stopper makes it a working decanter for a schnapps, a liqueur or a good olive oil. It sits with the blue and white, the pewter and the dark wood of a traditional or Old World room and brings a shot of ornament to a plainer modern shelf. For a shop or designer client it is the collectible, decorative German stoneware piece that styles a bar vignette and sells on its figures and its gilding.