Artist Unknown
Flask
- c. 1647
- Marbled slipware (earthenware)
- Italy
- Gift of R. H. Valentine, 2023
- 235 x 154 x 115mm
- 2023/088
Location: W A Sutton Gallery
This remarkable mid seventeenth-century marbled slipware bottle, or costrel, originates from a pottery production region in Tuscany and likely left Italy containing wine or oil. Also known as a pilgrim flask, it has holes through the moulded satyr masks to hold a rope cord. It is almost identical to the vessel pictured in Gerrit Dou’s The Physician (1653)
(Timeless: Treasures from the Historical Collection 19 September 2026 – 30 May 2027)
Exhibition History
![Andreas Cellarius Hypothesis Ptolemaica Sive Communis Planetarum Motus Per Eccentricos Et Epicyclos Demonstrans [The Ptolemaic Hypothesis or Common Representation Demonstrating the Planetary Motions through Eccentrics and Epicycles] 1661. Hand-coloured engraving. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, William A. Sutton bequest, 2000](/media/cache/05/97/05970cdff0f6b3264062d69bf2aa90f5.jpg)
See this work extra close-up.
Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024
This remarkable mid seventeenth-century marbled slipware bottle, or costrel, originates from a pottery production region in Tuscany and likely left Italy containing wine or oil. Also known as a pilgrim flask, it has holes through the moulded satyr masks to hold a rope cord. A near-identical vessel is found in Gerrit Dou’s The Physician (1653).
Related
Collection
Gerrit Dou The Physician
Gerrit Dou was Rembrandt van Rijn’s first pupil, training with him in Leiden from the age of fourteen before developing the meticulous style for which he became renowned. His paintings are distinguished by their extraordinary precision and detail, and were prized by European collectors for their intimate scale and carefully staged settings. In 'The Physician', Dou presents a medical practitioner examining a flask of urine as part of the practice known as uroscopy, here to test for pregnancy. Dou used his own likeness for the physician, while the carefully arranged objects around him – including an open anatomy book, instruments and a celestial globe – evoke a world of medical knowledge and inquiry. The marbled earthenware flask is closely related to a seventeenth-century Italian vessel recently given to the Gallery (and exhibited nearby), offering a tangible link to the material world that Dou inhabited.
(Timeless: Treasures from the Historical Collection 19 September 2026 – 30 May 2027)