Tibor chocolatero (Chocolate jar) (1725–75): Artwork and History

Tibor chocolatero (Chocolate jar) (1725–75) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Workshop unknown (Viceroyalty of New Spain, present-day Mexico) Puebla, Mexico.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

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 ware.

Object facts

• Title: Tibor chocolatero (Chocolate jar)
• Date: 1725–75
• Artist attribution: Workshop unknown (Viceroyalty of New Spain, present-day Mexico) Puebla, Mexico
• Place of origin: Puebla
• Medium: Earthenware and tin glaze, with iron
• Dimensions: With key: 42.6 × 27.9 × 27.9 cm (16 13/16 × 11 × 11 in.); Without key: 38.1 × 28 × 28 cm (15 × 11 × 11 in.)
• Type: Ceramics
• Department: Arts of the Americas
• Reference number: 1923.1537

Collection credit

Gift of Eva Lewis in memory of her husband, Herbert Pickering Lewis

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.