Bichrome IV Trefoil Jug with a Striding Bird

Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BCE · Bichrome IV ware · Wheel-made · H. 19 cm

A wheel-made trefoil jug with an ovoid body, a short, wide neck and a pinched mouth, the strap handle rising from the rim to the shoulder, painted with a ladder pattern and ending on the body in a painted hook. A black band marks the base of the neck; otherwise the pale buff ground is left open for a single bird on the side opposite the handle.

The bird strides to the right. Its body is a large circle divided into segments of chequer, hatching, concentric arcs and solid red, with a pointed rear ending in a small splayed tail. The long neck, filled with red, curves up and forward to a head with a large ringed eye and an open, toothed beak. A small cross-hatched wing rises from the back as a separate plume. The legs are thin and angled, with splayed, comb-like feet. The black is worn on the lip and handle and the surface has minor chips.

Commentary

This is a Bichrome IV pinched-mouth jug of the kind Gjerstad grouped among his trefoil-jug types, with a short neck and ovoid body, a family of shapes he illustrated in fig. XXXIV [1]. Gjerstad noted that the free-field style was used above all on pinched-mouth jugs [1], and the bird was its most frequent subject [4]. The ware, shape and composition place the jug in Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BCE [1][2].

The painter built the bird from a compass-drawn disc and then filled it like a shield, alternating chequer, hatching, arcs and red in wedge-shaped fields. The same principle of a body subdivided into red and hatched quarters recurs across the bird jugs of the period [3]. The wing set apart from the back as a free-standing plume recalls one feature of the "Salamis bird" that Caubet isolated in a Bichrome IV group attributed to a workshop in eastern Cyprus, although that type has a short neck and short legs, unlike the long neck and wading legs here [3]. The open, toothed beak and bull's-eye are common free-field conventions. As with most of these birds, no species can be named [4].

Among published parallels, three Cesnola jugs in the Metropolitan Museum are closest. 74.51.507 (H. 20.2 cm) has a round, patterned body with a long neck and splayed legs, and 74.51.501 (H. 28.1 cm) shows a larger bird of the same build [7]; 74.51.503 (no. 160) belongs to a bird-and-lotus group probably painted in a single workshop [2]. This jug omits the lotus and all filling ornament, a pure single-motif composition.

The jug has an unusually well documented modern history. It appears, reversed, on plate 13 of the 1881 album of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola's finds [5], and it was sold in the Lawrence-Cesnola sale at Sotheby's in 1883 as lot 277, together with a larger jug painted with a horse-like animal [6]. General Pitt-Rivers's manuscript catalogue sketches both jugs in colour under that lot and records this one as "a bird flying", 7½ inches high, matching its present height of 19 cm [8]. The jug stayed with Pitt-Rivers and his heirs for more than ninety years before reappearing at Sotheby's in 1975 [9]. No find-spot was recorded for it, so its origin within Cyprus is unknown. Jugs of this class were used for pouring, and complete examples come mostly from tombs.