The Baroque era saw the production of many different types of drinking and pouring vessels, often made of pewter. The guilds, for instance, commissioned drinking vessels in the shape of larger than life-size versions of the tools of their trade or their coats of arms. Another type of vessel was called the Welcome, a drinking vessel that was handed around as a form of greeting or when a toast was being drunk. The body of these vessels was generally cylindrical or potbellied, with a lid and a short shaft set on a circular base.

Far fewer plain everyday plates have survived from the 15th and 16th centuries than drinking vessels and containers of the same period. The earliest pewter plates and bowls to have survived in any quantity date from the 17th century.

In the last half of the 16th century two places in Europe evolved quite independently, though simultaneously, a new technique for casting pewter. The product was a type of relief-decorated ware known as “display pewter” (Edelzinn), and it gave a new and brilliant impetus to the trade. The first examples were made between 1560 and 1570, and the main centers of production were Nürnberg and Lyon. In the beginning the technique used was not the same in both towns. Whereas in France, relief pewter was cast in engraved brass molds worked with a burin, in Nürnberg etched molds were used. This suggests that the two towns were not influenced by each other in any way. Later on, however, Nürnberg pewterers were strongly influenced by the work of a celebrated French pewterer, François Briot, who was active in Montbeliard, in the county of Württemberg.

The first master pewterer documented to have made relief pieces in Lyon is Roland Greffet, between 1528 and 1568. One can assume that it was he who invented this type of work. A school producing tankards and dishes with relief decoration soon grew up in Lyon. The most common decorative motif was an arabesque, which was used in a variety of ways and can be thought of as the leitmotif for the work of this group of artists. The master of relief pewter was François Briot. His most famous piece is the Temperantia Dish, which takes its name from the allegorical figure of Temperance or Temperantia that appears in the center of it. It dates from 1585–90.

Pewter with etched relief decoration was made by Nürnberg pewterers from the last third of the 16th century onward. The earliest piece made by Nicholas Horchhaimer, bearing the date 1567, is a dish cast in an etched mold with an allegorical figure representing Fame, or Fama, in the center and historical scenes or incidents from classical mythology around the edge. Other large dishes made by Horchhaimer and his contemporary Albrecht Preissensin are again decorated with themes from classical antiquity or sometimes with biblical scenes; for smaller plates they kept to abstract decoration.

The use of etched molds did not remain fashionable in Nürnberg for long, and toward the end of the 16th century engraved molds were being used here as well. The work of François Briot was copied by Caspar Enderlein, who modeled his own Temperantia Dish directly on Briot’s. The decoration on the ewer that went with it was modeled on Briot’s Mars Dish and on a piece known as the Suzannah Dish, which is also attributed to Briot.

In the second quarter of the 17th century, smaller relief plates superseded the big dishes and jugs made in Nürnberg. The Mannerist allegories that had been in favor completely disappeared, to be replaced by scenes from the Old and New Testaments, equestrian portraits of the German emperors with the electors round the edge, and luxuriant floral decorations. These plates are no more than about seven inches (18 centimeters) in diameter and are generally flat and disk-shaped. The molds were no longer made by the pewterers themselves but by professional mold cutters, who occasionally added their own monograms. Since molds were often sold by one workshop to another and then to another, one sometimes finds plates cast in the same mold but with different touches. Small decorative plates of this type were so popular that they continued to be made as late as the 18th century. There are no less than nine different models for a plate with an equestrian portrait of Ferdinand III of the House of Habsburg, who was crowned emperor of Germany in Nürnberg in 1637. Similar plates depicting Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Emperor of Turkey, and Duke Eberhard im Bart of Württemberg were also produced.

Few places, apart from Nürnberg and France, had a flourishing trade in relief pewter. A few master pewterers in Saxony did execute relief decoration, however, mainly on jugs; they adapted their motifs from lead or bronze plaquettes made in southern Germany. Plates bearing the arms of Switzerland were also produced by Swiss pewterers in the 17th century. They have scenes taken from the history of Switzerland. The golden age of relief pewter, which had begun about 1570, ended in the third quarter of the 17th century. During this period, individual craftsmen had elevated pewter from its humble status as a material from which functional articles were made to one in which brilliant artistic feats could be performed. Relief pewter pieces were solely works of art, nonfunctional objects valued as showpieces.

Pewter dishes made in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries have chased, etched, engraved, or chiseled decoration and lean heavily on artists working in brass or bronze for their designs. An independent pewter trade does not seem to have existed in Italy on anything like a large scale until the 18th century.

After the Thirty Years’ War the production of functional articles in pewter noticeably increased in northern Europe. Besides a very large number of different types of jugs, each region specializing in its own characteristic design, there were plates and dishes used at table and also basins and bowls, drinking mugs, and screw-top flasks.

Yet pewter was already feeling the draught of competition by the end of the 17th century. In this time pewter began to be superseded by products of other branches of the decorative arts. Its first rival, faience ware, was initially no more than an inferior substitute for porcelain; but because the factories that were soon springing up everywhere were able to produce very large quantities of faience, they inflicted heavy damage on the pewter trade. Faced with this situation, the pewterers switched to imitating the designs used by the silversmiths, in the hope of gaining favor in the more ambitious middle class circles. This attempt was successful; and, from the first quarter of the 18th century onward, “silver-type pewter” gained a firm hold, soon influencing the production and appearance of pewter ware made in the Regency and Rococo periods.

By about the middle of the 18th century, an ever-widening variety of articles was being made: the pewterers were able to supply anything from a spoon to a whole dinner service, including mustard pots, sauceboats, and spoons for serving punch. But this period of prosperity was short-lived. By the third quarter of the 18th century, pewter was rivaled both by porcelain, which could now be produced relatively cheaply by several factories in Europe, and by the even cheaper English earthenware that flooded markets on the Continent. This new development sealed the fate of the pewter trade. Towns that once had 20 or 30 busy and successful workshops had no more than one or two by the beginning of the 19th century.

Although in Germany the demand for pewter seems to have increased for a few years after the Napoleonic era, particularly in country districts, by the middle of the 19th century industrialization finally put an end to a trade that had flourished for centuries.

In the second half of the century, when stylistic imitations were all the rage, pewter vessels were produced in the Neo-Baroque, Neo-Rococo, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance, and other styles that followed the many historicizing trends that emerged. Yet these pieces were made more often by mechanized metalworking factories than by pewterers. The Art Nouveau style that became fashionable at the end of the 19th century brought about a revival of pewter production; and individual firms succeeded in making original, well-designed pieces that are often of considerable aesthetic importance. The firm of Kayser in Oppum near Krefeld played a leading part in this revival. But the outbreak of World War I spelled the end of Art Nouveau—whose heady run of success had anyway been short-lived—and with it the end of old pewter.