Pair of Delftware Tobacco Jars

Of baluster form with stepped gilt-brass covers, each jar is painted in cobalt blue with a seated exoticised figure smoking a long clay pipe, flanked by tobacco bales and a pedestal urn inscribed respectively Nagelgeur and Toskaanse. Large arching tobacco plants rise above the scene, reinforcing the commercial purpose of the jars as both storage vessels and pictorial advertisements.
Tobacco jars of this type were produced in Delft throughout the 18th century for use in tobacconists’ shops, where they both stored and identified imported blends. The inscriptions here denote popular tobaccos: Nagelgeur (“clove-scented”) and Toskaanse (“Tuscan”). The imagery of “Indian” pipe-smokers—though a European invention rather than an ethnographic likeness—was intended to evoke distant origins and the global networks of the Dutch Republic’s trade, particularly under the auspices of the VOC (Dutch East India Company).
The stepped gilt-brass covers, original to the jars, added both practical function and visual splendour, catching the eye of customers amid rows of jars in an 18th-century tobacconist’s interior. Surviving matched pairs with their period brass covers are comparatively rare, as many were separated, damaged, or later refitted.