Jar with Vertical Flowing Bands and Vines with Sunflowerlike Blossoms

Arts of the Americas

1700–50

Talavera poblana
Puebla, Mexico

Talavera poblana, a tin-glazed earthenware, was made in the central Mexican town of Puebla beginning in the sixteenth-century. The name likely refers to the majolica-producing city of Talavera de la Reina in Spain. Talavera emulated the designs of fashionable imported Spanish ceramics; like its Spanish prototypes, it showed the influence of Islamic, Chinese, Italian, and French ceramics, all present in cosmopolitan Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and transmitted to Mexico during the colonial period. The shape of this jar resembles that of a Chinese quan vessel. Its decorative treatment includes flowering bands and sinuous vines with abstracted sunflower-like blossoms. The blue-and-white body is enlivened by polychrome panels with abstract vegetal motifs at the base of the vessel.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Talavera Poblana (Unknown Role)
Title: Jar with Vertical Flowing Bands and Vines with Sunflowerlike Blossoms
Place: Puebla (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1700–1750
Medium: Tin-glazed earthenware
Dimensions: 62.5 × 40.2 × 40.2 cm (24 5/8 × 15 7/8 × 15 7/8 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Eva Lewis in memory of her husband, Herbert Pickering Lewis
Reference Number: 1923.1443
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/10431/manifest.json

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, exh. cat. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), pp. 474-475 (ill.).
Judith A. Barter and Monica Obniski, For Kith and Kin: The Folk Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 30–31 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, Mexican Majolica of the 17th to the 19th Centuries, 1967, no cat.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, Oct. 10, 1990-Jan. 13, 1991, cat. no. 227; traveled to San Antonio Museum of Art, April 6-Aug. 4, 1991; Los Angeles Museum of Art, Oct. 6-Dec. 29, 1991.
Chicago, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum [National Museum of Mexican Art], Mexicanidad, Dec. 27, 2001–April 27, 2002, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, The Silk Road and Beyond: Travel, Trade, and Transformation, Sept. 30, 2006–Apr. 22, 2007, cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, For Kith and Kin: The Folk Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, cat. pp. 30–31.

Herbert Pickering Lewis (1876–1922), Mexico City, Mexico, from late 19th/early 20th century [correspondence and research in curatorial object file]; by descent to his widow, Eva Lewis (born Eva Hill, died c. 1964), Mexico City, Mexico, from 1922 [exported from Mexico Oct./Nov. 1923; received in Chicago Dec. 3, 1923 according to correspondence from Eva Lewis to Robert Harshe, Nov. 4, 1923, and incoming permanent receipt R1335, Dec. 3, 1923, copies in curatorial object file, Arts of the Americas]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1923.

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