"Caster Ware" Vase with Hunt Scene (mid-100s CE): Art, History and Details

"Caster Ware" Vase with Hunt Scene (mid-100s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The wide body of this vase is decorated with a hunting scene in which a stag, doe, hare, and hound chase each other around the vessel. Dotted lines above and below the animals form a border around the scene, though the heads of the creatures occasionally poke above it. While larger barbotine decorations were usually mold made and applied to a leather-hard surface, the figures on our pot were piped on by hand.

Object facts

• Title: "Caster Ware" Vase with Hunt Scene
• Date: mid-100s CE
• Culture: Rhenish (Cologne), Gallo-Roman, mid-2nd Century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: reddish ware with black burnished slip and Barbotine decoration
• Dimensions: Diameter: 14.2 cm (5 9/16 in.); Overall: 14.2 cm (5 9/16 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1992.126

A detail from the museum

“Hunt cups” like this one were a specialty of artisans working in Roman Cologne during the 2nd century CE.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.