# Jug Signed by Ennion > Ennion - 1st half of the 1st century CE (c. AD 1-50) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/ennion/ennion-signed-glass-corning/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-13 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Ennion - **Date:** 1st half of the 1st century CE (c. AD 1-50) - **Medium:** Glass, blown in a four-part mold; handle applied in opaque white glass - **Dimensions:** 18.4 x 10.6 cm (7 1/4 x 4 3/16 in.); diameter at rim 7 cm (2 3/4 in.) - **Object type:** Glass - **Period:** Roman, Early Imperial, Julio-Claudian - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gallery 166 (Greek and Roman galleries) - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A small amber-brown glass jug blown into a mold that carried, as part of its own design, the name of the man who made it: ENNIWN EPOIEI, "Ennion made [it]," in Greek. Ennion worked in the middle decades of the first century AD, probably at Sidon on the Phoenician coast, at the exact moment mold-blowing was invented, and his signed vessels are the earliest branded manufactured objects to survive from antiquity in any quantity. This jug is one of only twenty-six relatively complete signed Ennion vessels known, and the only one on which the handle is made in a contrasting opaque white glass.It passed through the nineteenth-century Paris collection of Julien Greau, was bought with that collection by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1913, and came to the Metropolitan Museum as Morgan's gift in 1917, where it has been on view for more than a century. Whether "Ennion" names one man working within his own lifetime or a workshop brand that outlived him is still argued by specialists; the archaeological evidence, including a fire-destroyed house in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter that preserves a jug from the same mold family, points to a short, sharply bounded period of production and gives no support for the brand continuing for decades after any individual master's death. ## 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. - **c. AD 1-50** Ennion's workshop `[documented]` (origin) The maker's mark, ENNIWN EPOIEI, is cast in relief into the vessel as part of the mold design, identically on every vessel blown from that mold. The workshop is generally placed at Sidon, in Roman Syria, though the location is argued rather than documented; see the attribution note and narrative above. - **-by 1895** Unknown; a single undocumented claim of acquisition in Constantinople `[unknown]` (gap) No archaeological find-spot and no owner is documented between manufacture and the jug's appearance in a Paris collection by 1895. Wilhelm Froehner's 1903 catalogue records only a bare assertion that it had been acquired in Constantinople (ancient Byzantium, modern Istanbul), with no further detail. - **by 1895-1913** Julien Greau, Paris `[documented]` (collection) In the glass collection of the Paris collector Julien Greau, catalogued in full, with an illustration of this jug, by Wilhelm Froehner in 1903. - **1913** J. Pierpont Morgan, New York and London `[documented]` (purchase) Morgan bought the Greau glass collection in its entirety in 1913. No price for the collection, or for this jug individually, appears in the sources consulted. Morgan died later the same year. - **1913-1917** J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. `[documented]` (inheritance) Inherited on his father's death in 1913. - **1917-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift) Given to the Museum in 1917 by J. Pierpont Morgan Jr., accession number 17.194.226. On permanent public display in Gallery 166 as of 2026. ## Open questions - Where was this jug before it appears in the Julien Greau collection by 1895? The only claim on record, that it was acquired in Constantinople, rests on a single line in Wilhelm Froehner's 1903 catalogue and is not independently documented. - Was Ennion's workshop ever active outside Sidon? The case for a second workshop near Aquileia rests entirely on the western distribution of surviving cups, and no kiln site linked to glassworking, let alone specifically to Ennion, has been excavated at either location. - Did molds bearing Ennion's name continue to be used after the death of the individual who first cut them? No securely dated find later than AD 70 has been identified for the signed corpus, but the corpus has never been systematically tested to establish whether all inscribed pieces share a single glass recipe consistent with one workshop and one period. - Why does the maker's inscription shift between the imperfect tense used on this jug and the aorist tense used on most signed cups? Lightfoot states directly that the reason is not understood. - What does the companion inscription found on some Ennion cups, invoking the buyer, actually mean? It has been read both as an active wish and as a passive one by different translators, and in any case this jug does not carry that inscription; it carries only the maker's mark. - What price, if any, did J. Pierpont Morgan pay for Julien Greau's glass collection in 1913, and what portion of it might reasonably be attributed to this jug? No figure appears in the sources consulted for this record. - Has this specific jug ever been chemically analyzed? The Metropolitan's 2014-15 scientific study tested two of its three signed Ennion vessels; this one, being intact, was not sampled, and no comprehensive compositional study of the wider signed Ennion corpus has been undertaken anywhere. ## Sources - [1] Christopher S. Lightfoot, with contributions by Zrinka Buljevic, Yael Israeli, Karol B. Wight, and Mark T. Wypyski, Ennion: Master of Roman Glass (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014; distributed by Yale University Press). Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 9, 2014 - April 13, 2015. Cited throughout for the catalogue entry, provenance, technical description, and condition report of cat. no. 1 (this jug), the essays by Lightfoot ('Ennion and the History of Ancient Glass'), Wight ('The Mold-Blowing Process'), Israeli ('The Ennion Jug from Jerusalem'), and Buljevic ('Ennion and Aristeas Glassware Found in the Roman Province of Dalmatia'), the appendix by Wypyski ('Scientific Analysis of Two Vessels Signed by Ennion'), the List of Find-Spots, and the Concordance. - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection Online, 'Glass jug' (Ennion jug), accession 17.194.226. - [3] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection API, object record 249470 (accession, dimensions, gallery location, image files). - [4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection Online, 'Glass cup' (Ennion cup), accession 17.194.225. - [5] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection Online, 'Glass hexagonal amphoriskos' (Ennion flask), accession 81.10.224. - [6] Wikimedia Commons, file and license metadata (extmetadata) for the Metropolitan Museum's donated CC0 photography of accessions 17.194.226, 17.194.225, and 81.10.224, consulted to verify public-domain status before use. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Ennion'. Tertiary source, consulted only for cross-checking and for the general (looser) estimate of 'fifty to fifty-five' surviving signed or fragmentary pieces, which is broader than and not fully reconcilable with the twenty-six relatively complete vessels catalogued in source 1. Flagged for replacement with further primary scholarship (Harden 1935; Israeli's other publications) if this record is expanded further. --- 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.