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Updated: June 26, 2025
Scarce anything can be meaner than the vanity which details the contents of China closets, basins, ewers, and chamberpots. Horace Walpole, with all his talents, makes a silly figure when he gives an upholsterer's catalogue of his goods and chattels at Strawberry Hill. January 5. This day I began to review Taschereau's Life of Molière for Mr. Gillies, who is crying help for God's sake. Messrs.
Upon brancards, supported by two or four men or more, according to the weight of the objects borne, were placed enormous brazen cratera, chiselled by the most famous artists; vases of gold and silver whose sides were adorned with bas-reliefs and whose hands were elegantly worked into chimeras, foliage, and nude women; magnificent ewers to be used in washing the feet of illustrious guests; flagons encrusted with precious stones and containing the rarest perfumes; myrrh from Arabia, cinnamon from the Indies, spikenard from Persia, essence of roses from Smyrna; kamklins or perfuming pans, with perforated covers; cedar-wood or ivory coffers of marvellous workmanship, which opened with a secret spring that none save the inventor could find, and which contained bracelets wrought from the gold of Ophir, necklaces of the most lustrous pearls, mantle-brooches constellated with rubies and carbuncles; toilet-boxes, containing blond sponges, curling-irons, sea-wolves' teeth to polish the nails, the green rouge of Egypt, which turns to a most beautiful pink on touching the skin, powders to darken the eyelashes and eyebrows, and all the refinements that feminine coquetry could invent.
Chafing-dishes of bronze at which vanished hands had been warmed, stood beside chased brazen ewers made to pour rose-water over henna-stained fingers, after Arab dinners, eaten without knives or forks.
I must state, in truth, though with deep mortification, that I cannot find in inventories even of Revolutionary times the slightest sign of the presence of balneary appurtenances in bed-rooms; not even of ewers, lavers, and basins, nor of pails and tubs.
In the middle ages the customary pieces of plate in English homes were basins, bottles, bowls, candlesticks, saucepans, jugs, dishes, ewers and flagons, and chafing-dishes for warming the hands, which were undoubtedly needed, when we remember how intense the cold must have been in those high, bare, ill-ventilated halls!
A coffer of frosted silver, set off with small figures in jewelry and precious stones, and supported on four feet of gilt bronze, contained various necessaries for the toilette; two frosted Psyches, decorated with diamond ear-rings; some excellent drawings from Raphael and Titian, painted by Adrienne herself, consisting of portraits of both men and women of exquisite beauty; several consoles of oriental jasper, supporting ewers and basins of silver and of silver gilt, richly chased and filled with scented waters; a voluptuously rich divan, some seats, and an illuminated gilt fable, completed the furniture of this chamber, the atmosphere of which was impregnated with the sweetest perfumes.
For dessert there were the spicy apples of Auvergne, Spanish oranges, raisins, figs, little sweet cakes, wine white and red, and nuts in a great carved brass dish of the finest Saracen work, with carved wood nut-crackers. Ewers and basins of decorated brass, for washing the hands after the meal, were ready.
Bordeaux, Madeira, and Alicant sparkled like rubies and topazes in large glass decanters, while two Sevres ewers were filled, one with coffee a la creme, the other with vanilla chocolate, almost in the state of sherbet, from being plunged in a large cooler of chiselled silver, containing ice.
Many large pieces of silver made in the period of the Renaissance were made simply with a view to standing about as ornaments. Cellini alludes to certain vases which had been ordered from him, saying that "they are called ewers, and they are placed upon buffets for the purpose of display." The salt cellar was always a piece de resistance, and stood in the centre of the table.
Bridgewood, a merchant, sent me a silver basin and ewers for a present. On the 10th of October, stilo novo, my husband had his audience of his Majesty in his palace, at Lisbon; going in the King's coach with the same nobleman and in the same form as he made his entry. The King received him with great kindness and respect, much to his satisfaction.
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