NAVIGATION

A Rare and Tall Turned Rhinoceros Horn Cup
Rhinoceros Horn 
Moghul / India
17th / 18th Century 

SIZE: 17cm high - 6¾ ins high

In 1525 - 6 the Emperor Barbur, founder of the Mughal dynasty of North India, wrote in his diary that he had acquired a boat shaped drinking cup made from the horn of a rhinoceros. This was reputedly purchased over 200 years later by Sir Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753) whose vast collection went on to form the basis of the British Museum. Rhinoceros horn was prized in the Middle and Far East for its believed properties as an antidote to both poison and melancholy, as well as for its rarity and beauty.
     Many European rhinoceros horn carvings were produced as a direct result of contact with those carvings made in China. However, it is not known when vessels of rhinoceros horn first arrived in Europe. The earliest documented evidence occurs at the end of the 16th century when ‘a vessel made of rhinoceros-bone ornamented with silver, most artfully and prettily made’ was presented to the Governor of Portugal by a group of Japanese Christians travelling on a Portuguese ship, visiting southern Europe between 1584 and 1586. In 1601 it is recorded that ‘un corno di rino ceronte’ was one of several rare and precious articles taken to Beijing by the Jesuit missionary Father Matteo Ricci, who most probably believed he was presenting the Chinese Emperor with an object he had never seen before. He did not realise that this rhinoceros horn, was already very familiar to the Wanli Emperor, and that the beliefs in the magical powers and abilities of rhinoceros horn had originated more than one thousand years previously in China.