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Maurice Howard, Professor of Art History, in the Victoria and Albert Museum with a great silver leopard, a life-size flagon for wine, of early 17th-century design.

On the web and in poster form around campus, Maurice Howard, Professor of Art History, is seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum with a great silver leopard, a life-size flagon for wine, of early 17^th-century design.

But that’s an 19^th-century electrotype of the original and it stands in the V&A’s British Galleries as an example of the design extravagance of the Jacobean age.

Now the original silver object has returned from the fabulous collections of the Kremlin in Moscow, as part of the V&A’s exhibition ‘Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars’, which runs until 14 July.

It was sent to Russia as part of diplomatic gifts in the reign of King James I.

Professor Howard has written the introduction and an essay on heraldry for the book of the show.

He says: “The incredible thing about the original is the quality of finish, the sense of the animal’s fur and the fact that it is in perfect condition, having been largely left uncleaned for many years.

“As our Russian colleagues are constantly saying, if this object had stayed in Britain it would undoubtedly have been melted down in a century of civil war - but in Russia it survived revolution and conflict in much more recent times.”

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