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Tobacco jar

Category

Ceramics

Date

1770 - 1800

Materials

Ceramic, brass

Order this image

Collection

Mompesson House, Wiltshire

NT 723461

Summary

A pair of Dutch Delft tobacco jars with brass covers. Base painted with marks: One (Carotte) with BP for the 'De Vergulde Blompot' workshop, Delft, active from 1616 to 1841. The other (Violet) with the mark of ‘De Drie Klokken’ (Three Bells) factory (established 1671).

Full description

Both jars are painted in blue with the same scene: A large, lidded pot stands on a plinth beneath a palm tree. On one jar, the pot reads ‘Carotte’ and on the second, Violet.’ To the left is a large barrel containing tobacco leaves. To the right sits a racialised figure in a feather headdress with a skirt of tobacco leaves, smoking a pipe. Behind and to the right are two ships under sail. On the far left are more barrels, one monogrammed VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company). These jars are a testament to the popularity of tobacco in the 18th century. They were used to store tobacco in its dried form known as ‘carottes’ (hence the inscription on one of the jars.) These were the dried and twisted leaves of tobacco supplied from plantations in America and the Caribbean, worked by enslaved people. Carottes were shipped in bales to Europe where they were purchased and ground into fine tobacco for sale. Many flavours of tobacco were sold, often reflected in the inscriptions of placenames or varieties added to the jars – as here with the flavour ‘violet’. The decoration on both pots shows an imagined figure that conflates racial stereotypes of both Indigenous and African peoples, itself reflecting the merging of Indigenous and African labour used in the European tobacco industry. By the 18th century this type of imagery had become synonymous with tobacco products and was often used on packaging, advertising and even shop signage. Tobacco plantations were established in America by Europeans in the early 17th century. In the first decades of English tobacco cultivation on the island of Bermuda, Indigenous and African men and women were put to work on strips of land beside English settlers to teach the skills of tobacco cultivation. In Virginia, settlers took knowledge from the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan peoples with labour supplemented by Indentured English and, increasingly, enslaved African peoples. Indigenous practices not only influenced tobacco cultivation, but also consumption. Smoking tobacco was considered largely sacred and mostly smoked in religious or diplomatic situations. Shared smoking of a pipe often featured in early meetings between colonists and Indigenous peoples and records show that right-angled clay pipes were favoured; this style of pipe influenced European smoking paraphernalia such as clay pipe design. Stereotyped images of Indigenous peoples came to be associated with tobacco points of sale, but the commercialisation of tobacco growing and consumption had an irrevocable impact on their lives, not shown in any decoration. Indigenous lands were seized by Europeans for plantations and many endured enforced labour upon them. The wider availability of tobacco meant that its consumption became more commonplace, no longer reserved for the spiritual, ceremonial and diplomatic use that it once held.

Marks and inscriptions

VOC and CAROTTE

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