GERMAN GLASS. WILLKOMM HUMPEN. ENAMELLED WITH THE EAGLE OF EMPIRE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Now it is not too much to affirm that, as a whole, the enamelling on German glass is in every way bad. The colours are opaque; when not crude they are muddy and dull. It is almost too high praise of them to say that they look as if they had been painted on in oil-colours. Take, for example, an average adler-humpen, such a one as the big beaker in the British Museum (Slade, No. 835). A mustardy yellow, that takes the place of the gilding that is absent in the main painting, is predominant; there is then an opaque blue, crude and unpleasant, and a dull maroon, which—and this is universally the case on these glasses—is the nearest approach we get to red. Apart from these colours we find only browns and drabs of undecided tints. So much for the main decoration; but if we now look carefully we find round the neck something that takes us back to Venice—a delicate scale pattern of fine powdered gold, and above this a line of beading with little pearls of various colours. This band of exotic ornament is seldom absent, at least in the earlier specimens.[[198]]
There is no need to say much of the shapes of these enamelled glasses, for they are almost invariably of a more or less cylindrical form, with a foot of the simplest character; covered glasses are comparatively rare. They may be divided for our purpose into the broader beakers (often with curved sides and sometimes of great capacity) on the one hand, and on the other the narrower straight-sided tall cylinders. Much ingenuity has been devoted by German writers to the identification of the names by which these glasses were known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they have attempted to distinguish between the spechter, the bröderlein, the Krautstrunk, the pass-glas, the humpen and the willkomm. On the other hand, the term wiederkomm or vidrecome, given by so many English and French writers to the large broad forms, is unknown in Germany, so that I think the expression may be definitely abandoned and replaced by the word humpen or willkomm humpen. Narren-gläser—fools’ glasses—says Mathesius, would be a better name for these huge beakers that a man can hardly lift. The tall, narrow cylindrical form, when divided by horizontal lines, is known as a pass-glas. The spechter of Mathesius has been identified with a glass of this shape, sometimes decorated with square nail-headed studs. These spechter came from the Spessart forest district (west of Würzburg), and they form, as it were, a link between the prunted green glass of the Rhine and the enamelled beakers of Central Germany.
There is a small group of enamelled glass of very uncertain origin which claims attention here. We are concerned with certain little ewers, either of colourless or more often of deep cobalt-blue glass; they are generally mounted in metal, but the handle is always of glass. There are several examples of these ewers in the British Museum, many of which bear dates ranging from 1577 to 1618. The cobalt-blue glass has, by Dr. Brinckmann, been traced back to the glass-houses of Neudeck Platten, on the Saxon-Bohemian frontier. In the treatment, however, of the enamels on these little jugs, we are reminded of some of the work executed by the Altarists in France. The enamelling is of a somewhat more pleasing character than that which we find on the big beakers; white, yellow, green, and red are applied without shading. A favourite subject is a stag-hunt or the coursing of a hare, and at the side is often found a graceful lily of the valley[[199]] ([Plate XL.] 2).
1. ENAMELLED BEAKER
GERMAN, ABOUT 1600
2. ENAMELLED JUG WITH PEWTER LID
GERMAN, END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY
To return to our broad cylindrical glasses—the huge humpen and the smaller kanne, both of which indeed sometimes take the form of a barrel or a truncated cone—it is usual, on the basis of the decoration, to divide these beakers into the following classes:—
1. The Reichs-adler Humpen. On these, the double-headed eagle, displayed, with imperial crown, occupies nearly the whole surface of the glass. A big crucifix covers the breast of the bird, though this is replaced in some examples by the ball of empire. The arms of the seven electors and of the forty-eight members of the Heilige Römische Reich are arranged in a definite order along the outstretched wing feathers[[200]]([Plate XXXIX.]).