Goblet with Maternity Scene

This covered goblet would have been used to serve a beverage known as kandeel, a nourishing mix of eggs, liquor, and cinnamon, commonly served to women shortly after child birth. It is engraved with a design that reflects this, depicting a maternity chamber with a new mother in a canopied bed, a seated nurse rocking a baby in a cradle, a device for drying diapers, two chairs and a table set with two dishes of sweetmeats, and two goblets of the same shape as this one. Along the rim runs the toast T WELVAAREN VAN DE KRAAMVROUW EN KINDJE, which reads, “to the health of the woman in childbed and her baby.”

The engraving is attributed to the Amsterdam glass engraver Jacob Sang (active 1752–62). There was an enormous demand in the Netherlands for personalized glassware, indispensable accessories used to commemorate a wide range of political, commercial, and personal occasions in Dutch drinking culture. Standard themes were commemorated by glasscutters of different skills, who often consulted the same design sources, with varying degrees of success, and applied their engravings to glass blanks of different qualities. Sang was one of Amsterdam’s most skillful and acclaimed engravers, and this covered goblet is a finely-blown vessel with perfectly-placed optic bubbles in the stem.