Looking at this extraordinary Netherlandish coconut cup, made around 1540 and now at the National Gallery of Art, it is easy to assume that the gilded silver made it precious. In the sixteenth century, however, the coconut itself was a luxury material. Still exotic in Europe, its shell was carved with coats of arms, foliage, birds, and monstrous masks, then fitted with mounts and transformed into a drinking vessel believed capable of neutralizing poison.

The cup originally had a lid, now lost. Although the metalwork is identified as Netherlandish, the museum describes the coconut only broadly as a material native to Southeast Asia and does not establish where this particular fruit grew.(1)

The cup has been known to scholars and collectors for more than a century. It was owned by Albert and Hedwig Ullmann of Frankfurt by 1906 and appeared in a 1914 exhibition of historic goldsmiths’ work from Frankfurt collections. Their purchase notebook recorded the vessel together with its surviving lid. Following Nazi persecution, Hedwig Ullmann fled Frankfurt with her sons and their families in 1939. They left most of their collection behind, but the coconut cup accompanied them to Australia, where the family changed its surname to Ullin. The vessel later passed through auctions in London and Geneva, a Belgian private collection, and Galerie Kugel in Paris before its acquisition by the National Gallery in 2024.(2)

Marc Rosenberg included it in his foundational study of goldsmiths’ marks in the 1920s. John F. Hayward reproduced it in his major study of Mannerist goldsmithing, while Rolf Fritz catalogued it in his specialist survey of Central European coconut vessels from 1250 to 1800.(3) These references securely place the cup within the history of European goldsmithing, but they do not, on the evidence presently available, establish the geographical origin of the coconut itself.

The date nevertheless makes that omission especially intriguing. The cup was fashioned only nineteen years after Magellan’s expedition reached the Philippine archipelago in 1521. Antonio Pigafetta recorded coconuts and palm wine in the Visayas and devoted an unusually detailed passage to the palm. He explained how its sap was collected in bamboo tubes and how its fruit supplied liquid, flesh, milk, oil, vinegar, fibre, and shell. To Pigafetta, the coconut was a material wonder through which a European audience might imagine an unfamiliar island world.(4)

The Philippine history of the coconut involved specialized systems of cultivation, extraction, transport, and manufacture. Ramón Jordana y Morera’s 1885 Bosquejo geográfico é histórico-natural del archipiélago Filipino provides an illustration of a worker climbing a coconut palm with a bamboo collecting vessel strapped to his back. In the plate titled “Aprovechamiento de la tuba del cocotero,” two palms are connected by horizontal bamboo poles. Rather than descend from each tree, the worker could pass between their crowns, balancing on one pole while using another as a handrail. (5)

Tuba was obtained by cutting the unopened flowering spathe and attaching a bamboo vessel to receive the sap. Jordana describes the use of rattan bindings and powdered bark placed inside the container to affect the drink’s strength and color. The fresh sap fermented quickly. It could be consumed as tuba, allowed to sour into vinegar, or distilled into a stronger liquor.(6) Earlier Philippine botanical writing attributed an even wider range of uses to the palm. Ignacio de Mercado described coconut oil, medicines, sweets, vessels, spoons, rosaries, torches, cordage, ship caulking, charcoal for silversmiths, writing surfaces made from leaves, and tuba taken from the flower stalk. Such accounts reveal a whole technological and medicinal system organized around the tree.(7)

Jordana also records one of the most evocative modes of coconut transport. Fruits bound for markets, warehouses, or oil works could be tied together and floated across the water. Held by a rope around the mass, the coconuts themselves formed a raft on which their transporter could ride. The coconut could literally carry itself through the Philippine waterscapes before an emptied shell entered another economy of value.(8) In Europe, one hollowed shell became a precious vessel, carved and enclosed in gilded silver.

The potential of discovering more about a work of art by examining its materiality is why I frequently collaborate with botanists, conservators, and other scientists as an art historian. Art history can explain how this cup was carved, mounted, exhibited, collected, inherited, displaced, sold, and preserved. Scientific analysis may be able to ask another question: where did the coconut grow? Research on coconut genetics has identified broadly differentiated Pacific and Indo-Atlantic populations, demonstrating that histories of cultivation and dispersal remain embedded in the plant’s biology.(9) This does not prove that the shell came from the Philippines. None of the museum records or established literature cited above currently makes that claim. It does, however, make the question scientifically testable rather than merely speculative.

The Philippines later became one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of coconut products, yet its coconut history has often been reduced to agricultural statistics, leaving out the larger material culture surrounding the tree. I have known something of that materiality since childhood. When I was in Grade 4, our class was assigned to make lacquered coconut chalices. We scraped out the meat, sanded the shell, mounted it on a base, and coated it until it shone. I received barely a passing mark, but the process left me intimately familiar with the coconut as a difficult, resistant, and transformable material. If I were to write an art history of the coconut, I would return to such ordinary acts of making: tuba gatherers crossing bamboo bridges between trees, sap fermenting in suspended vessels, coconuts bound into floating rafts, shells fashioned into utensils and rosaries, and tropical materials remade as European treasures. The next scene would show Antonio Pigafetta and Magellan’s crew drinking tuba to excess, shortly before Magellan was killed at Mactan and many of his surviving men were massacred in Cebu.#

Notes

1. National Gallery of Art, “Coconut Cup with Silver Gilt Mounts,” Netherlandish, c. 1540, coconut and silver gilt, accession no. 2024.125.1. The NGA catalogue describes the carvings and mounts and identifies the coconut broadly with India and Southeast Asia, but it does not assign this shell a specific botanical provenance.
2. National Gallery of Art, “Coconut Cup with Silver Gilt Mounts,” provenance and exhibition history; Maike Brüggen, Kunst in der Krise: Die Sammlung Hedwig und Albert Ullmann und der Frankfurter Kunstmarkt im Spiegel des Ersten Weltkriegs (PhD diss., Technische Universität Berlin, 2021), 82–83, 192 n. 810. The Ullmann purchase notebook listed the vessel with its now-lost lid. After Nazi persecution, Hedwig Ullmann and her family emigrated to Australia in 1939, taking the cup with them while leaving much of the collection in Germany. The NGA records subsequent sales at Sotheby’s London in 1974 and Sotheby’s Geneva in 1997, followed by a Belgian private collection, Galerie Kugel, and the NGA acquisition in 2024.
3. Marc Rosenberg, Der Goldschmiede Merkzeichen, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1922–28), 2:190; John F. Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976), 365, pl. 291; Rolf Fritz, Die Gefässe aus Kokosnuss in Mitteleuropa, 1250–1800 (Mainz am Rhein, 1983), 96, no. 40, repro. 23a. The NGA bibliography gives “Hayward,” rather than “Haward.”
4. Antonio Pigafetta, account of the Magellan voyage, in Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, vol. 33 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906). Pigafetta’s description of the coconut palm records its sap, fruit, oil, vinegar, fibre, and household applications.
5. Ramón Jordana y Morera, Bosquejo geográfico é histórico-natural del archipiélago filipino (Madrid: Imprenta de Moreno y Rojas, 1885), plate 12, “Aprovechamiento de la tuba del cocotero.” The plate shows the tapped palms, bamboo connections, climbing notches, collecting vessel, and worker carrying equipment.
6. Jordana, Bosquejo, discussion of the extraction, fermentation, and distillation of tuba.
7. Ignacio de Mercado, Libro de medicinas de esta tierra y declaraciones de las virtudes de los árboles y plantas que están en estas Islas Filipinas, seventeenth-century manuscript. The details require citation to a modern transcription or edition of Mercado rather than to Ambeth Ocampo’s newspaper summary before scholarly publication.
8. Jordana, Bosquejo, discussion of coconut transport by floating masses of fruits secured with rope.
9. Bee F. Gunn, Luc Baudouin, and Kenneth M. Olsen, “Independent Origins of Cultivated Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) in the Old World Tropics,” PLOS ONE 6, no. 6 (2011): e21143. The authors identified two highly differentiated cultivated coconut populations corresponding broadly to the Pacific and Indo-Atlantic regions.