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This remarkable object made entirely of pure silver sits behind a glass casing in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It was created in 1647 in the Netherlands by Dutch artist Daniel Gijsberts, and despite being surrounded by an array of valuable artifacts from the Dutch Golden Age, this silver cup’s intrigue is not dulled or desensitized by the beautiful things around it primarily due to its strangeness and its charm. This piece of silver, sitting at about 6-7 inches in height, looks nothing like a traditional cup or wine glass due to its unusual design and unconventional properties. Upon first sight, this object might be thought to be a bell. The base is a hollow, cup-like shape with a wide bottom tapering up to the rounded top. This bell silhouette when inverted is the basin of the cup but can only be placed on a surface upside down.
Where a stem and base on a traditional wine glass would be emerges a miniature of the Netherlands’ most iconic national symbol: a windmill. The silver that forms the windmill is intricately carved to mimic materials for a wooden house with a shingled roof. A pipe is also attached to the windmill then curves upwards like the mouthpiece of a horn with a recognizable mouthpiece to blow into. The air blown into the hollow pipe would travel up into the windmill and cause the four blades on the back to spin, recalling the national icon dotting the Netherlandish countrysides.
The bell/cup shape is covered in ornate silver designs; florets, curves, floral patterns, and swirls fill the entire facade leaving no negative space.
A large silver clockface with recognizable numbers ranging from 1 to 12 and miniature hands is visible over a carving of a little door with a small Dutch man peeking out. So lifelike and animated, he looks as though he could bound down the long silver ladder in front of him and slide right off the cup. The ladder extends from the windmill to about halfway down the cup then abruptly ends, attached to nothing on the other side.
A second figure is climbing the ladder towards the windmill and the small man at the top. This second figure holds the curved silver railing next to the ladder, and to his left is a long-curved pipe, about the same length as the ladder itself.
~The cup though beautiful is not decorative~
Though its purpose is not obvious from its form, the MFA's description of this cup labels it as a drinking game.
Though its purpose is not obvious from its form, the MFA's description of this cup labels it as a drinking game.
Here's how it goes:
Here's how it goes:
On each turn, players would have flipped the cup over and filled it with alcohol, most commonly a weak, local beer.
After blowing into the little tube to turn the windmill's blades, the drinker would then try to gulp down their beverage before the blades stopped spinning or face a penalty.
The hands on the clock would also spin in conjunction with the windmill, and the number landed on depicted by the clockface would be the number of "penalty" drinks the player had to consume.
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