Claret jug

This highly embellished jug for claret, a French red wine, is a testament to an Anglo-Indian aesthetic. This style proved fashionable among British officers based on the subcontinent, Anglophile Indians, as well as markets abroad. The jug’s central motif features a tree sprouting three elongated mangos, a shape known on the subcontinent as kunj. In Europe, this motif is better known as “paisley, ” after the Scottish city of Paisley, which, by the early 1800s, was an important center for manufacturing textiles inspired by or copied from patterns woven on the shawls produced in the Kashmir region.