Bichrome IV Jug with a Waterfowl Catching a Fish

Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BCE · Bichrome IV ware · Wheel-made · H. 15 cm

A small wheel-made jug with a nearly spherical body on a low ring base and a narrow cylindrical neck, now broken away at the mouth. Wheel ridges show on the lower body. A broad dark band circles the base of the neck and two narrower bands survive higher up.

The shoulder carries a single free-field scene. At left a waterfowl with a hatched and cross-hatched body and wing stretches a long neck across the shoulder in a series of tight S-bends, ending in a small head with a ringed eye whose beak drops toward the fish below. The fish, to the right, has a pointed head, a dark painted body and a forked tail, with fins drawn as bundles of parallel purple-red strokes. Grey-black smoke staining from a modern fire covers much of one side, and the red has faded to a ghost in places.

Commentary

The jug is Bichrome IV, the wheel-made Cypro-Archaic I ware painted in matt black and red on a light slip, and the leading carrier of free-field painting [1]. Its subject, a bird seizing or reaching for a fish, is among the best-known compositions of the style. The Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola jug 74.51.527, at 16.8 cm almost the same size, shows the same encounter; its catalogue notes that the scene was popular in Cypriot vase-painting, that such vessels may have come from one or two workshops in the east of the island, and that a Nilotic source for the subject is possible, adapted to Cypriot taste [2][3]. A jug in the Cyprus Museum (1981/V-4/5, H. 19 cm) reduces the same idea to a bird with a row of chevrons like fish bones before its beak [4].

The bird's neck is unusually long. It snakes across the whole shoulder before turning down, so that the bird's body and the fish sit far apart and the neck binds the scene together. The fish follows the construction Caubet described for Bichrome IV painters, who built bird and fish from the same pointed ovoid and added fins or legs [5]. Neither animal can be named as a species; the painters worked from a generic waterbird and a generic fish [5].

The date rests on the ware, the free-field composition and the close parallels, all of which belong to Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BCE [1][2]. Earlier descriptions of the jug as Cypro-Geometric are not supported. Because the mouth is lost, the rim form cannot be confirmed, though a pinched mouth is the usual form for figured jugs of this group [1].

Small figured jugs of this size were used for pouring and are known mainly from tombs. The discolouration is modern: the jug was caught in a fire that damaged the collection it belonged to, and the smoke staining should not be read as ancient burning.