Sugar bowl

Thomas Cains

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The chainlike decoration on this sugar bowl and pitcher (69.167) was achieved by applying two parallel threads of glass and then nipping them together to form the connected ovals. This mode of decoration dates back to ancient Roman times and was revived on sixteenth-century Venetian and late-seventeenth-century English glass. It appeared again on English glass in the second half of the eighteenth century. Thomas Cains, who came from Bristol, England, was the proprietor of both firms that may have produced these pieces.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art