# Lidded Ewer > Adam van Vianen - 1614 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/adam-van-vianen/van-vianen-memorial-guild-ewer-rijksmuseum-bk-1976-75/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-09 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Adam van Vianen - **Date:** 1614 - **Medium:** Silver, raised and chased from a single sheet, gilded after manufacture - **Dimensions:** 25 x 14 x 9 cm (9 7/8 x 5 1/2 x 3 3/8 in); weight 910 g - **Object type:** Silver - **Period:** Dutch, early seventeenth century (Dutch Golden Age) - **Current location:** Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A silver-gilt ewer just 25 centimetres high, raised and chased from a single sheet of silver by the Utrecht silversmith Adam van Vianen in 1614, commissioned by the Amsterdam goldsmiths' guild to mourn a member of neither city's guild: Adam's brother Paulus, court goldsmith to Rudolf II in Prague, who had died there the year before. It is generally treated as the founding masterpiece of the Dutch auricular, or kwab, style, and it appears repeatedly as a studio prop in Amsterdam history painting through the mid seventeenth century.The guild that commissioned it lost it: guild ownership across the Dutch Republic collapsed after the Batavian Revolution of 1795 and the formal 1798 abolition of the guild system, and the ewer was sold in 1821 for a mere 166 guilders into an unnamed Scottish private collection. It resurfaced at auction in 1976, when the Rijksmuseum bought it back for 700,000 guilders, then the highest price recorded for a piece of Dutch silver.Two long gaps in the record, the years immediately after 1794-98 and the 155 years of the Scottish ownership, are recorded here as gaps. What survives at both ends of them is not in question: one sheet of silver, worked into a memorial by one presumed inventor of an ornamental style for the other. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1614** Guild of goldsmiths and silversmiths, Amsterdam `[documented]` (commission) Commissioned directly from Adam van Vianen of Utrecht to commemorate his brother Paulus van Vianen, who had died in Prague in 1613. Neither brother was a member of the Amsterdam guild. - **1614-1794/1798** Guild of goldsmiths and silversmiths, Amsterdam `[documented]` (guild ownership and display) Kept, probably in guild offices adjacent to the Amsterdam town hall, and on public or semi-public view for close to two centuries; described by Sandrart in 1675 and reproduced repeatedly in Amsterdam paintings during this period. - **1794/1798-1821** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap following guild dissolution) Dutch guilds were formally abolished under the Batavian Republic's 1798 constitution (the Staatsregeling), following the disruption of ordinary guild life after the Batavian Revolution of January 1795. No source consulted establishes what became of this specific object, or who held it, in the years between the guild's effective loss of standing and the 1821 sale. - **1821** Unnamed private collector, Scotland `[documented]` (sale) Sold for 166 guilders. The figure and the destination (a Scottish private collection) are consistently reported, but the seller, the buyer and the sale itself are not documented in any source consulted. - **1821-1976** Unnamed Scottish private collection (and presumed descendants) `[unknown]` (private ownership) No source consulted names the owner or owners across this 155-year span, or establishes whether the object remained with a single family or changed hands more than once before reappearing at auction in 1976. - **1976-present** Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam `[documented]` (purchase at auction) Purchased for 700,000 guilders, with the Vereniging Rembrandt pledging to underwrite up to one third of the price to a maximum of 250,000 guilders, alongside support from the Prins Bernhard Fonds and the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum. The specific auction house, sale city, exact date within 1976 and consignor are not identified in any source consulted. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **1976** Not identified in sources consulted (multiple secondary sources report only that the ewer 'came up for auction in 1976'), - Estimate: Not identified in sources consulted - Hammer: Reported as 700,000 guilders in the majority of sources consulted - With premium: Not separately and reliably documented; one source gives a total of 812,000 guilders inclusive of buyer's premium against a 700,000-guilder hammer, but this could not be corroborated against a second independent source - Every source consulted agrees the Rijksmuseum's total acquisition cost was a record for Dutch silver at the time, and that the Vereniging Rembrandt pledged up to one third of the price, capped at 250,000 guilders, alongside the Prins Bernhard Fonds and the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum. No source consulted names the auction house, sale city, exact 1976 date, lot number or consignor. This record adopts 700,000 guilders as the reported total price and flags, rather than resolves, the single conflicting 812,000-guilder figure. ## Open questions - No guild resolution, contract or payment record for the 1614 commission has been identified in the sources consulted; every account of the decision to commission Adam, a non-member, to memorialise Paulus, also a non-member, rests on Sandrart's description of 1675, written six decades after the fact and imprecise on at least one point (he attributes the commission to the City of Amsterdam rather than the guild). - What happened to the ewer between the guild's effective loss of standing after 1794-95 and its formal 1798 abolition, and the 1821 sale, is not established in any source consulted; the object is undocumented for this window. - The 1821 buyer, the Scottish collection itself, and its ownership across the following century and a half (1821-1976) are not named in any source consulted. - The 1976 sale is not documented beyond a bare price and the Rijksmuseum's own supporting funders: no source consulted names the auction house, the sale city, the exact date within 1976, or the consignor. One source's figure of 812,000 guilders inclusive of premium, against 700,000 guilders elsewhere reported as the total price, could not be corroborated and is flagged rather than resolved. - Whether the paintings by Lastman, Van Nieulandt, Tengnagel, Koninck and Flinck reported in the secondary literature depict this specific ewer, rather than a generalised auricular-style vessel, was not independently verified against primary reproductions in this research; only the two Eeckhout paintings carry independent institutional confirmation. - No firm date is given in the sources consulted for when the ewer, made and sold as plain silver, was gilded. ## Sources - [1] Rijksmuseum, 'Lidded ewer', collection object page, BK-1976-75. - [2] Vereniging Rembrandt, 'Kan met deksel vervaardigd voor het Amsterdamse zilversmidsgilde'. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Memorial Guild Cup (Adam van Vianen)', consolidating the Vereniging Rembrandt account, Liedtke (2007), Oxford Art Online (Schroder) and Trilling (2001). Tertiary; flagged for replacement with the primary literature it cites (ter Molen 1979 and 1984, Baarsen 2018). - [4] CODART Canon, 'Lidded Ewer'. - [5] Allison Stielau, 'Fit Vessel: Kwab at the Rijksmuseum' (review of Reinier Baarsen, Kwab: Ornament as Art in the Age of Rembrandt, Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2018), West 86th, vol. 26, no. 1 (2019), pp. 110-124. - [6] Jessica Whittle, 'Chaos and Creation: Adam van Vianen's Gilt Ewer', The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3 (2021), pp. 196-215. - [7] Joosje van Bennekom, Ellen van Bork and Arie Pappot, 'The Unsurpassed Silversmithing Techniques of Adam van Vianen: His Silver Ewer Unravelled', The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3 (2021), pp. 216-243. - [8] Richard Checketts, 'Adam van Vianen and Ghosts of Silver in the Late-Renaissance World', in Helen Hills (ed.), Silver: Material Transformations, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Accepted-manuscript version consulted. - [9] J.R. ter Molen, Van Vianen: een Utrechtse familie van zilversmeden met een internationale faam, 2 vols (PhD thesis, University of Leiden; Leiderdorp: J.R. ter Molen, 1984). The key monograph and catalogue raisonne on the family; cited here at second hand via sources 5 and 8, not consulted directly. - [10] J.R. ter Molen, 'Adam van Vianen's Silverware in Relation to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting', Apollo, vol. 110 (1979). The apparent original source for the identification of the ewer in several of the paintings named in this record; not consulted directly, cited at second hand via sources 3 and 11. - [11] RKD (Lastman in Focus research project), bibliography page, checked for any direct link between Pieter Lastman's paintings and the Van Vianen ewer; none found beyond the ter Molen 1979 citation. - [12] Th. M. Duyvene de Wit-Klinkhamer, 'Een vermaarde zilveren beker', Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, vol. 17 (1966), pp. 79-103. The earliest dedicated modern study of the object; cited at second hand via source 8, not consulted directly. - [13] Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Kunste (1675), ed. A.R. Peltzer (Munich: G. Hirth's Verlag, 1925), p. 223. The earliest written account of the ewer. - [14] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Isaac Blessing Jacob', Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, accession 25.110.16. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Isaac Blessing Jacob (Gerbrand van den Eeckhout)', citing Great Dutch Paintings from America (1990-91 exhibition catalogue) for the identification of the depicted ewer via comparison with an engraving by Michiel Mosyn after Eeckhout. - [16] Wikipedia, 'The Continence of Scipio (Gerbrand van den Eeckhout)', on the Rijksmuseum's own painting SK-C-1631, whose cataloguing identifies the depicted vessel as this ewer. - [17] Rijksmuseum, 'Basin with scenes from the story of Diana and Actaeon' (and companion ewer), Paulus van Vianen, 1613, BK-16089-A. - [18] Barnebys Magazine, 'The Art of Ornamentation: Van Vianen Silver'. - [19] Oud Utrecht, 'De Utrechtse edelsmeden Adam en Paulus van Vianen'. - [20] Social Enterprises and Institutions for Collective Action (collective-action.info), dataset entry 'Guilds - The Netherlands', on the 1798 Staatsregeling and the formal abolition of Dutch guilds. - [21] Wikimedia Commons, file records and extmetadata (LicenseShortName, Artist, Credit) for the images used in this record, verified via the Commons API. - [22] Wikipedia, 'Adam van Vianen' and 'Paul van Vianen'. Tertiary biographical summaries, flagged for replacement with ter Molen 1984 (source 9). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.