Highlights from Decorative Arts and Design

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Although surviving Venetian glass dates only from the Renaissance, early archaeological and documentary evidence shows that glass was produced in Venice as early as the seventh century on the island of Torcello and in the city proper by the tenth century. In 1291, because of fire hazard, the glassworks of Venice were relocated to the island of Murano , where they remain today.

The fall of Christian Syria (about 1400) weakened the Islamic world's domination of the glass market and lent impetus to the Venetian industry. It is likely that refugee Syrian glassmakers settled in the city at that time, bringing with them techniques of enamel decoration and gilding inherited from the earlier glassmaking tradition of the Eastern Roman Empire . Venetian glassmakers came to rely heavily on Islamic vessel forms and decoration; by 1500 Venice had become the prime source of common and luxury glass for both Europe and the East.

The strong ties Venice established with the East are evident in this sumptuous gilded and enamel-decorated ewer. Its shape imitates Eastern metal prototypes. It is one of a group of ten glass vessels of identical shape but differing decoration. Assembled from four pieces (body, spout, handle, foot), the ewer is characteristically Venetian in concept and execution, but Islamic influences appear in the form of the body and in the band of white flame-patterned enamel on the neck. The shell gilding with red, green, and yellow enamel dots is typical of Venetian luxury glass of this period and was meant to imitate gem-encrusted vessels of gold or silver.

This enameled plaque by Pierre Courteys depicts the introduction to the tale of the love of the mortal Psyche for the god Cupid as told by the Roman satirist Apuleius. The protagonist, Lucius, is a Greek adventurer magically transformed into a jackass. Here he pricks up his ears to listen as an old woman tells Psyche's story to a bride kidnapped on her wedding day and awaiting ransom.

Courteys, a member of a family of skilled enamel painters from Limoges , was noted for his elegant figures and vigorous painting style. He rarely executed original compositions but, like most Limoges enamel painters, obtained ideas from other sources. He made a series of plaques depicting the story of Psyche.

Enamel painting, related to stained-glass painting, was developed in the early fifteenth century, probably in the Netherlands . The brilliant pigments were made from powdered metallic oxides suspended in liquid, applied like paint, then fired. The demanding techniques and meticulous skills of copper enameling were brought to their highest level by artisans of Limoges , a medieval center of enamel work.

The earliest Limoges plaques (around 1470) were religious images commemorating pilgrimages, shrines, or saints' lives and were used for private worship. By the mid-1500s a more worldly and sophisticated clientele demanded secular subjects and luxury items; enameled plates, plaques, candlesticks, saltcellars, jewel boxes, and mirror backs were produced for the wealthy of Europe . Large plaques like this one were used as architectural ornaments and set into wainscoting and door panels.

Tin-glazed pottery was produced in the ancient Middle East by the Babylonians, and the technique—applying a tin glaze painted with metallic oxides to ceramic—has been in use continuously since that time. Hispano-Moresque potters employed it extensively in the fourteenth century, and it became popular, then famous, in Italy . Known there as maiolica, the technique developed into a sophisticated art form during the fifteenth century.

Maiolica centers were established in Florence , Faenza , and in Urbino, where by 1525 the most notable Italian maiolica was produced. Urbino artists improved the glaze palette in range and brightness and also began to use the entire surface of the plate as a pictorial ground, much as if it were a canvas. Vessel forms and styles of depiction gained in scale and complexity; pieces of this sort were commissioned by patrons as gifts or for personal display on a sideboard or buffet.

This plate is painted in the istoriato (narrative) style, also developed in Urbino. It shows a scene from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, an epic glorifying the Estes, an Italian noble family. Here the hero, Ruggiero, appears on a winged beast between architectural columns, a classically composed group of figures beneath him and a walled city and landscape in the background.

Slipware was produced in London by 1630, largely by Puritan potters inclined to decorate their work with lugubrious mottos such as Fast and Pray or Remember Thy End. The rare Staffordshire wares of Thomas Toft and William and George Taylor by contrast are notable for their trailed slip (liquid clay) decoration and dot-outline figures. A versatile medium, slip can be applied as paint or a dip, trailed, dripped, or applied with a knife and incised to expose the contrasting clay body.

Most Toft and Taylor presentation pieces carry a lively decoration of royalist themes, acknowledging lighter-hearted political times following Oliver Cromwell's fall. This charger (a large serving dish) depicts Charles II's famous escape when, having sheltered in a house near the great wood of Boscobel, he and a Major Careless were advised to hide in the trees to avoid capture by Cromwell's soldiers. Early next morning the prince and the officer climbed a dense oak and enjoyed a quiet day picnicking in its branches while observing the Roundheads vainly hunting for them below.

The imagery of these delicate vases evokes a central decorative and social conceit of the eighteenth century. Here a refined and elegant couple, comfortably dressed in costumes of the period, perch on naturalistic rocks and indulge in what seems to be a well-mannered flirtation. This is the world of ease and intimacy, painted by the rococo artists Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, and Jean Honoré Fragonard, in which the cultured and educated classes of France created gardens of controlled rusticity—an artful grotto here, a wild area there—in contrast to the extreme formality of seventeenth-century gardens, architecture, and the ceremonies and manners of aristocratic life.

Much of French eighteenth-century art celebrates this new ease. The creator of this charming pair of vases has incorporated the rococo notion of elegant entertainment (fête galante) into a functional design. The flower-draped neoclassical urns were designed to hold sweet-scented potpourri; their pierced decoration is thus also practical.

Although each vase is self-contained and compositionally balanced, they are meant to be seen as a pair. The two skillfully modeled figures speak across the space between them. Although porcelain figures were extremely popular in the mid-eighteenth century, most were poorly composed and weakly modeled. Together with Johann Joachim Kändler of Meissen and Franz Anton Bustelli of Nymphenburg, Nicholas Lecroux of Tournay was among the few modelers to take the making of porcelain figures beyond the genre of craft and into the realm of fine arts.

Ostensibly a dessert service, the thirty-eight pieces in this porcelain set suggest much about its makers and its owners. Produced at the Chamberlain's Worcester porcelain works sometime between 1807 and 1811, the set portrays forty-two scenes from twenty-nine of Shakespeare's plays. Each piece is inscribed with the mark "Chamberlain's Worcester, Manufacturers to their Royal Highnesses, the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cumberland" and bears an identification and quotation from the depicted act and scene.

The set was probably decorated by Humphrey Chamberlain Jr., from 1807 the head of the Worcester factory established by his family in the late eighteenth century. He developed a technique of painting on porcelain in brush strokes so delicate it was said they could be seen only with a magnifying glass. His virtuosity was likely reserved for the factory's most select productions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Worcester porcelain competed with the products of Sèvres in France ; this set may have been among the lavish display pieces made to demonstrate the British ware's high quality.

Chamberlain's nephew later recorded that "one small dessert service painted with Shakespeare subjects by my uncle" was purchased by the prince regent for £4000, an astronomical sum in the early 1800s. Whether it was this set is not altogether clear, but only a very wealthy patron could have afforded such a service. A remarkable and beautiful example of Regency taste, the set would have been appreciated rather like a miniature gallery, each piece admired as an individual work of art.

Boards almost an inch thick form the drawers of this early eighteenth-century chest, in its time an innovative piece of furniture. From the Middle Ages onward householders had used lidded chests for storage, and their simple forms changed only very slowly. The addition of pull drawers to the lift-top chest was a successful modification, and during the seventeenth century two- and even three drawer chests were made. Finally cabinetmakers did away with the lidded compartment altogether, creating this type of four-drawer chest, which is stilll found today.

In many ways this chest cheerfully pretends to a status it does not possess. The once-vivid painted decoration of birds, fleurs-de-lis, and flowers was intended to suggest the elaborate inlaid and japanned designs found on more complicated European pieces. The painted decoration relates to other examples generally attributed to coastal Connecticut .

The chest's construction is both solid and sophisticated. Single dovetails join drawer fronts and sides. Along with the heavy construction and use of side runners to support the drawers, these features suggest an early eighteenth-century date in a period of rapidly changing technology and form.

The brothers Christian (1840–83) and Gustave (1830–98) Herter were German immigrants to New York . In 1865 they established a cabinetmaking and decorating firm that attracted wealthy clients in New York , Boston , Minneapolis , Chicago , and San Francisco . This new American upper class, its fortunes founded in commerce, proved eager to demonstrate a cosmopolitan awareness of both history and good taste. Families such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts commissioned Herter Brothers to decorate and furnish rooms, even entire houses, with beautifully crafted home furnishings comparable in luxury with the finest European productions.

In both America and Europe the taste of the late nineteenth century favored historicism and exoticism; decorative arts and architecture often quote from styles of the Near and Far East. This cabinet typifies both the oriental taste and extraordinary craftsmanship of the so-called aesthetic movement. Its Moorish elements include inlaid star and rosette shapes from Near Eastern tile patterns, the grillework of the drop-leaf door, and the geometric inlay bands framing the panels. The cabinet form recalls Islamic cabinets used from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries as lecterns for the Qu'ran and to store liturgical objects and texts.

From the 1870s onward prestigious Victorian upper-class homes might have included elements of Near Eastern design, such as Persian-style "cozy corners" and smoking rooms. This lavishly inlaid cabinet would certainly have suited such an exotic environment.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was the most famous American artist to work in the late nineteenth-century art nouveau style. The movement was conceived by artists attempting to form a new vocabulary of style in decorative arts in reaction to the Victorian taste for historical styles cast in pseudo-Gothic or classical terms. Proponents of art nouveau also wanted to eliminate distinctions of class between "high" art—painting, sculpture, architecture—and "craft", and so applied their energies equally to the design of jewelry and furniture.

Art nouveau artists and craftsmen cast out derivative Victorian styles, and developed a new decorative vocabulary from sinuous vines, flowers, and Eastern motifs. This exotic tea set is composed of overlapping pointed forms recalling lotus leaves in the Mughal arts of India . Their shapes, also suggesting feathers or insect wings, two favorite art nouveau motifs, embody a visual ambiguity valued by the movement.

Tiffany produced very little silver, perhaps because he wished to distinguish himself from his father's silver and jewelry firm. The son is best known for lamps, glass, windows, mosaics, and bronzes. He produced silver only on commission; fewer than twenty-four pieces survive. He designed this tea service for his own home, Laurelton Halls, the estate he designed and furnished from 1903 to 1904 in Oyster Bay , Long Island . This rare set illustrates the spare, elegant rhythms of art nouveau design and the energy that its advocates applied to the production of precious but functional objects for the home.