Flask with Face in the Metropolitan Museum, March 2022

Title: Flask with face

Maker: Jean-Joseph Carriès (French, Lyons 1855–1894 Paris)

Date: ca. 1890

Culture: French, Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye

Medium: Glazed stoneware

Dimensions: H. 15 1/2 in.; wt. confirmed: 9.5 lb. (39.4 cm, 4.3 kg)

Classification: Ceramics-Pottery

Credit Line: Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection, Purchase, Acquisitions Fund; Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; and 2011 Benefit Fund, 2013

Accession Number: 2013.489

The grimacing face reveals the artist's gifts as a sculptor–his profession before becoming a ceramicist. Carriès made an important series of masks, inspired by Japanese Noh theater and the gargoyles and carved faces on Gothic church architecture. His stoneware flasks with faces are an offshoot of this production. The bearded face as a motif on a water jug has its origins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German stoneware vessels known as Beardman or Bellarmine jugs.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/239561