Coin cup

Made of precious metals, mugs, tankards and goblets were once a sign of the owners' wealth and social status. Silverware was used as gifts on special occasions, used at festive feasts and displayed in sideboards – special furniture designed to hold and display representative tableware.

In the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century, a popular way of decorating table silver, especially tankards and mugs, was with coins and medals embedded in the bodies of the vessels. Many items of this type are known from Brandenburg, Royal Prussia and also Pomerania.

The cup on display, made by a Stargard master, is decorated with 36 Prussian triglyphs of the Polish King Sigismund I the Old. The Polish and Prussian trojak was readily used to decorate vessels due to the good quality of the metal. The coins were arranged in four rows of nine in such a way that their portrait obverses were visible. An additional three are placed on the bottom of the vessel. The surface of the cup between the coins is covered with a symmetrically composed engraved ornament of stylised floral thread. The smoothly worked planes of leaves and twigs create, together with the coins, a distinctive, lustrous pattern on a matt, scored background. The whole was framed by strips of smooth surface – wider at the mouth and narrower at the base.

The master's mark 'IB' stamped in a rectangle on the underside of the cup, combined with the dating of the vessel to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, indicate that the author of the work may have been the Stargard goldsmith Jochim Bremer IV (Joachim Brenner), known from 1696-1700.

Monika Frankowska-Makała