Late Medieval Netherlandish Lavabo

A 15th/16th century lavabo, a hanging bronze vessel for dispensing water over hands in order to wash them before eating or ritualistically during Mass.

Throughout this early period food was likely to be served on a wooden trencher and eaten with fingers and bread as well as perhaps a spoon, and a knife for the meat.

The example offered here, whilst typical in form, is considered finer than most with attractive, zoomorphic, dog-like heads terminating the spouts and well defined female heads wearing wimples for the lugs that would hold the swing handle, now lost. It exhibits a fantastic long-earned colour to the patina with relatively substantial traces of gilding where the spouts meet with the body and, to a somewhat lesser extent, where the flared rim meets with the globular body.

These fine attributes comfortably compensate for the lost handle, which in many extant examples is a later replacement.

h:5.5 inches to the top of the female heads
11 inches across the animals heads.