Card table

Charles-Honoré Lannuier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This superlative card table is one of a pair in the Museum's collection documented to the workshop of New York's resident French ébéniste of the Federal period, Charles-Honoré Lannuier. The tables are remarkable not only for their exquisite beauty but also because they are signed and dated masterpieces descended in the family of their original owner, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV of Albany. Commissioned by the New York City merchant William Bayard, the table was part of a larger purchase that included a nearly identical pair of card tables and two pier tables with gilded swan supports, wedding gifts for his daughters Harriet and Maria, who in 1817 married Stephen Van Rensselaer IV and Duncan Pearsall Campbell. The invoice for the Campbell pieces survives, revealing how expensive furniture from Lannuier's Broad Street shop was. The pair of card tables was priced at $250 and the pier table at $300--astonishing sums at a time when a journeyman cabinetmaker's wage was only about a dollar a day.

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