The present tankard is chased with grotesque motifs and scenes influenced by the work of a number of Nuremberg engravers, such as the goldsmith, artist and printmaker Wenzel Jamnitzer (d.1585) and especially Paul Flindt (1567- c.1730) whose published engravings provided silversmiths with numerous patterns for the decoration of silver in the Mannerist style.

Paul Flindt was himself the son of a goldsmith and was apprenticed in the trade before turning to printmaking; the majority of his prints are of designs for cups, plates, candlesticks and ewers, which he published in Vienna in 1592 and 1593, and in Nuremberg in 1594; his nearly 200 surviving engravings from 1592-1618 provide multiple combinations of scenic panels within strapwork containing grotesques and flowers, such as on the present example. Flindt evidently based many of the figures of animals found in his landscapes on earlier published bestiaries, such as Cunrat Gesner's Historia Animalium printed in Nuremberg in the 1550s.

A standing cup in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, also made in Augsburg circa 1595, shows similar decoration based on Flindt and with animals from woodcuts by Gesner and Jost Amman (see H. Müller, European Silver, 1986, cat. no. 51., pp. 176-159).

A closely-related tankard by Hans Waidelin, Augsburg, 1595, with scenic landscapes featuring a stag, a fox, and a leopard, was sold at Christie's, London, 30 October 1991, lot 73.