 Hi everybody! Welcome to another Barn's Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette and I'm a collection researcher here at the Foundation. Today we're going to go into gallery number 11 and look at one of my very favorite objects which is this sizable pewter tankard standing on this little chest and sharing wall space with paintings by Haim Soutine, Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and more. So let's go ahead and take a closer look. Here's the tankard. It's made in Germany toward the end of the 18th century. It's about 13 inches tall almost made of pewter which is a metal alloy consisting primarily of tin and as you can see it features some completely wonderful decoration. Most notably this ennobled pretzel flanked by lion's rampant. So let's go ahead and take a closer look at its crest here. So as we said in the center is this wonderful pretzel surrounded by three further loaves of bread. There they are kind of ensconced in this vegetal design with the kind of flower down here. It has a crown. The crown has jewels and these sort of floral finials. There's more vegetable decoration and I mentioned that it's bracketed by these lion's rampant here and here. Rampant means that they're standing on their hind legs with their four legs extended and their claws unsheathed. So here's one of them. Let's zoom in on him a little bit. So you can see the extended four legs, little claws. You can see the whiskers here, the tongue out and you can see he's looking towards this inscription up here that continues around onto the other side. And as you can see, it is in German and the sense of it is may God in heaven bless the fields so we may bake big breads and have a little money. So the fine sentiment, let's take a closer look at this lion over here as well. And then last inscription I'd like to look at is actually up here on top. So let's go back, find it. So at this angle we can't completely read it but we can see that it's surrounded by this reef here that's made out of wheat as another nod to its owners being on the baker's guild actually. And it's got this Latin inscription up here now which essentially says long live a well-made tankard and gives the year 1792. So altogether here we've got this big tankard. We've got this pretzel crest and I mentioned that it's the emblem of the baker's guild. So legend has it that the baker's got this emblem, this crest in the year 1683 when again, according to legend, the bakers were up overnight and there was a siege of the city of Vienna by Ottoman Turks and because the bakers were up preparing bread to be ready for the next morning they happened to notice some of them invading Turks laying mines and so they did rush off these bakers to alert the city commandant. They were able to thwart the attack and then the grateful emperor ended up awarding the bakers their emblem as a kind of thanks for saving the city from what would have been certain disaster. Now the veracity of this particular legend is disputable mainly because you see bakers emblems with exactly the same elements the breads the crown crier to the year 1683 but I think what it does show you is this huge amount of pride, institutional pride in the part of these bakers guilds which is actually a little bit complicated for this particular tankard because as much guild pride as we see in this exterior ornament it's actually stamped in the inside with the year 1766 so prior to this decoration was applied in the year 1792 which we're not able to see but it says right up there. So what's going on? It actually seems like this tankard might have been made for an individual because while it is big and goodness knows would hold a lot of beer at about 13 inches it's not anywhere near as big as the typical ceremony guild, ceremonial guild vessel to use during these communal ceremonies which were apparently very convivial affairs because their term Schliefkannen in German means essentially that they're so big that when they're full of beer you'd have to drag them to pass them to the next person. Either way it does seem that this one eventually made its way and was used and displayed within a guild. Now thinking of guilds, a note about craftsmanship. I want to turn our attention again just briefly to the long live a well-made tankard inscribed on its lid. Pewter was a material that was in use since antiquity and got to be common and popular for household use toward the end of the Middle Ages and thrived from there down to about the year 1800 and pewter's guilds were highly regulated full of professionals and if we just look at the level of craftsmanship in the inscriptions and the wriggle work that we can see in the the beasts around the pretzels you can appreciate it as a work of truly fine art which brings me to my next point. I did mention that this kind of artisanal pewter work started to fall off after about the year 1800 but happily this pewter found this pewter tankard found a second happy home in the walls of barns foundation so let's look at it down here and i'm going to read a letter letter to you that dr albert barnes himself wrote in the year 1948 explaining why he collected objects such as these so he wrote we constantly maintain in our books and our teaching that the great artists of all time have been not only the composers painters and sculptors but workers in the so-called useful arts like rottweier and pewter in fact i threw a bombshell into the teaching of art by claiming there was no essential difference between the fine and household arts i got the idea of proving my case by putting metal works immediately next to some of the best paintings from the 13th to the 20th century and so by putting by putting our tankard here in gallery 11 perhaps he wanted us to see that its upright form is not so very different from this portrait by modigliani or perhaps he wants us to see the pretzel in these writhing trees in this landscape by sutin either way long live a well made tankard thank you so much for joining um please hit subscribe and we'd love it if you leave comments thank you so much and have a good day i'm tom collins new bower family executive director of the barns foundation i hope you enjoyed barns takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation