Wine jug
Designer Friedrich Adler
Silver manufacture by P. Bruckmann und Söhne
Glass manufacture by Graflich-Schaffgot'sche Josephinen-Hütte
Not on view
In this art nouveau evocation of a German Renaissance stoneware jug, the designer took his personal style to a dramatic conclusion: The body of crystal glass with its stylized cut and matte thistle flowers is mounted in three slender, root-shaped silver straps descending from a wide silver lip decorated with embossed thistle motifs. The handle is formed to suggest a narrow branch, and the whole is crowned by a domed lid. This imaginative wine jug was the first of many vibrant creations invented by Adler for the firm of P. Bruckmann und Söhne, a leading European silver manufacturer in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Adler was unquestionably one of the most gifted German designers and sculptors of his time. As a professor of applied arts and crafts, he taught at the prestigious Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg from 1907 to 1933. In Nuremberg he directed an annual master class in design from 1910 to 1913, thus influencing a generation of young European craftsmen. Adler was dismissed from his various positions in 1933. In 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he died.
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