Ewer with Inscription, Horsemen, and Vegetal Decoration

The ewer stands 36.8 centimeters high, 30.6 centimeters wide and 21.3 centimeters in diameter at its widest point, worked in brass and inlaid with silver and a black compound. The Metropolitan Museum catalogues it under a title that describes its own decoration plainly: 'Ewer with Inscription, Horsemen, and Vegetal Decoration.' A band of mounted figures set in roundels runs around the body against a ground of scrolling vegetal ornament, and a further band of inscription runs around the neck.

It belongs to a small, closely studied group of inlaid brass vessels made in the Jazira, the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the early thirteenth century, for pouring water or wine in a household wealthy enough to own metalwork finished to this standard. The inlay is what made such an object legible from across a room and valuable enough to be kept: silver, hammered as wire and sheet into chased grooves, set off by a filled black ground so the pattern read clearly even in lamplight.

The neck inscription gives, in the maker's own words, exactly two names and a date: 'Made by `Umar ibn al-Hajji Jaldak, the apprentice of Ahmad al-Dhaki al-Naqqash al-Mawsili, in the year 623 [1226 CE].' It names no patron, no owner and no place of manufacture. Everything documented about the man who made this object comes from this one sentence.

The relationship it records is explicit and unusual to have preserved at all: an apprentice, naming himself as an apprentice, on a finished and dated commercial object. Signed apprentice work is rare enough in this period that the inscription is treated as primary evidence for how metalworking workshops in the Jazira actually organized labor and training, not only for who made this particular ewer.

623 AH runs, in the Gregorian calendar, from roughly late December 1225 to mid-December 1226; the Metropolitan Museum's own object record gives the corresponding date range as 1225 to 1227. The ewer therefore falls three years after the earliest securely dated work associated with the same master, Ahmad al-Dhaki's own signed ewer of 620 AH/1223 CE, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

D.S. Rice's foundational study grouped five inlaid brasses to this master's circle, spanning roughly 620 to 642 AH (1223 to 1242/43 CE): the Cleveland ewer, this ewer, a basin now in the Louvre made for the Ayyubid sultan al-Adil II around 1238 to 1240, and the so-called Homberg ewer of 640 AH/1242 CE, among others. This object sits early in that sequence, close to the master's own earliest documented work.

Ahmad al-Dhaki is the only figure in this story with more than a single inscription to his name. His epithet 'al-Dhaki' translates as 'the sagacious.' His own signed ewer of 1223, now titled by the Cleveland Museum 'Luxury Ewer Extending Good Fortune to the Owner,' carries a shoulder inscription wishing its unnamed owner good fortune, prosperity and peace, and is decorated with a wide band of medallions showing scenes of courtly and daily life, including one of the few known depictions of blowgun hunting in Islamic art.

Beyond Cleveland and the Louvre basin, a further ewer known as the Homberg ewer, dated 1242, is heavily altered, with a replaced spout and lost inlay, and shows Christian iconography that has been read as evidence of the workshop's contact with Syrian Christian patrons or craftsmen. Across roughly twenty years, this is the entire documented output of the master under whom `Umar ibn al-Hajji Jaldak names himself an apprentice.

The scholar who first grouped these objects and gave the milieu its name was David Storm Rice (1913-1962), in 'Inlaid Brasses from the Workshop of Ahmad al-Dhaki al-Mawsili,' published in Ars Orientalis in 1957. Rice's own reconstruction of the master's career was more mobile than the label that later attached to it: he proposed that al-Dhaki worked in Artuqid-controlled territory, possibly Amid, during the 1220s, and relocated toward Syria and Egypt only after the Artuqid principalities collapsed around 1232 and he needed new patrons.

Rice's wider body of work through the 1950s built the case for a distinct, named 'Mosul school' of inlaid metalwork, flourishing above all under the patronage of Badr al-Din Lu'lu', the atabeg who held effective power in Mosul from the 1210s and formal rulership from 1233. Several other pieces from this circle carry inscriptions recording their manufacture for Badr al-Din Lu'lu' by name. This ewer does not; it is linked to the group only through its maker's declared apprenticeship to al-Dhaki.

Within a matter of years, the 'Mosul school' framework that began as Rice's own carefully qualified reconstruction had become close to received wisdom in the literature on Islamic metalwork: a single named city, a single dominant patron, a lineage of named masters and apprentices. Howayda Al-Harithy's 2001 article in the Bulletin of SOAS, 'The ewer of Ibn Jaldak (623/1226) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the inquiry into the origin of the Mawsili School of metalwork revisited,' returns to that hardened consensus through close re-examination of this specific object, which she frames as 'a turning point in the development of Mawsili metalwork and a key piece to the puzzle.'

Julian Raby's later essay, 'The Principle of Parsimony and the Problem of the Mosul School of Metalwork' (2012), works the same ground from the opposite direction: rather than starting from Rice's Mosul attribution and testing it, Raby surveys the competing theories that had accumulated since these objects first entered European collections in the nineteenth century, identifies workshop marks across the inscribed corpus, and argues that a genuine Mosul atelier remains the most economical explanation for the evidence, while also tracing how the same inlay technique was carried outward and reproduced in Damascus and Cairo. By 2012, according to a review of Raby's essay, few scholars any longer dismissed the Mosul attribution outright, but fewer still treated it as a closed, single-city monopoly; the 'school' survives in the literature as a real but more porous and exported tradition than Rice's original naming implied.

The roundels of mounted horsemen and the surrounding vegetal scrollwork place this ewer within an established visual vocabulary of courtly self-presentation that recurs across the same workshop's output; Ahmad al-Dhaki's own Cleveland ewer carries a comparable band of courtly and hunting scenes in medallions. No source consulted publishes a detailed identification of what the individual roundels on this specific ewer show beyond the generic description in the Museum's own title, and this record does not invent one.

No patron is named, no dedicatee is named, and no source consulted proposes a hidden or esoteric program behind the horsemen and scrollwork. Read plainly, the decoration is ordinary luxury courtly imagery of the kind this workshop produced repeatedly for a market of buyers who wanted to be associated with mounted, princely leisure, whether or not any specific patron commissioned this particular piece. The absence of anything more specific is itself the honest finding here.

Between the date on the ewer and its appearance in a documented American collection, no owner, sale, dealer or location is recorded in any source consulted for this record. Six and a half centuries separate the inscription from the next fact that can be attached to the object.

This is not unusual for portable metalwork of this period and value, which moved through households, markets and, eventually, the nineteenth-century European trade in Islamic art without the kind of paper trail that later attaches to paintings passing through named auction houses. The gap is recorded here as a gap.

Edward C. Moore (30 August 1827 - 2 August 1891) trained in his father's New York silversmithing shop, became the exclusive supplier of silver to Tiffany and Co. in the 1850s, and moved his own manufactory into Tiffany in 1868, where he served as artistic director and chief silver designer until his death at his summer home in Hastings-on-Hudson. He collected across Islamic, Japanese, Greek and Roman decorative art, assembling roughly sixteen to seventeen hundred objects over his career, at a time when there was essentially no American market or institutional interest in Islamic art specifically.

He is recorded as having built his collection through personal and professional networks both in New York and abroad, including the dealers and connoisseurs Siegfried Bing, Samuel P. Avery, Alessandro Castellani, Samuel Colman and Albert Goupil, through private sales and public auctions in Paris and London, through the New York firms Tiffany and Co., A.A. Vantine and Co. and George A. Leavitt and Co., and through the world's fairs of Paris (1867, 1878, 1889), Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876). No source consulted for this record ties any of these specific channels to the acquisition of this ewer. How and when Moore obtained it is not documented.

Moore's 1891 bequest brought more than two thousand objects to the Metropolitan Museum, of which roughly four hundred were from the Islamic world: ceramics, glass and metalwork alongside jewelry, embroidery, papier-mache and wood. It remains, by the Museum's own account, the largest and most comprehensive single body of Islamic material ever to enter the collection, assembled before there was any real domestic market for it.

This ewer is one of several pieces of Islamic metalwork from that same 1891 accession year still catalogued and published individually by the Museum, alongside a basin with figural imagery (accession 91.1.521) and a tripod candlestick (accession 91.1.572), both separately recorded elsewhere in this corpus. All three entered the Museum together, in the same gift, from the same collector, in the same year, though nothing in the sources consulted connects their individual acquisition histories to one another before 1891.

Two separate gaps sit inside this record and neither should be smoothed over. The first is documentary: nothing is known about this ewer's whereabouts, owners or market history between 1226 and 1891, and nothing beyond this single inscription is known about the apprentice who signed it. The second is historiographical: the 'Mosul school' that this object is filed under was itself built, revised and partly re-tested by named scholars working across five decades, from Rice's original 1957 grouping through Al-Harithy's 2001 re-examination of this specific piece to Raby's 2012 defense of a qualified version of the attribution.

What is certain is narrower and more solid than either debate: a named apprentice, working under a named master, dated his own work to a specific year, and that object has been in one public collection, without interruption or dispute, for the century and a third since 1891.