Chocolate Jar with Iron-locked Lid

This jar was produced in Mexico and is made of a tin-glazed earthenware like that of Spanish majolica. At one time this jar probably held cacao beans that were most likely grown in Mesoamerica and exported to Europe and beyond. Its decoration further demonstrates the influence of European colonial powers and the cultures where they traded. The jar takes on the blue-and-white style popularized in ceramics from China.

Talavera poblana, a tin-glazed earthenware, was made in the central Mexican town of Puebla beginning in the sixteenth-century. The name likely refers to the majolica-producing city of Talavera de la Reina in Spain. Talavera emulated the designs of fashionable imported Spanish ceramics; like its Spanish prototypes, it showed the influence of Islamic, Chinese, Italian, and French ceramics, all present in cosmopolitan Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and transmitted to Mexico during the colonial period. This chocolate jar–with an iron cover, collar, and lock–would have been used to store valuable commodities like cacao beans. The blue-and-white ornamentation features panels composed of fringed curtains and scrolled leaves that frame long-tailed birds, a popular motif that may recall Chinese export Swatow ...