Plaque

Caroline H. Rimmer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Caroline H. Rimmer, a sculptor, worked and lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and it was perhaps inevitable that she would have modeled vessels at the Robertsons’ Chelsea Keramic Art Works there. She studied with her father, William, an artist and educator who taught anatomy and modeling. Her experience at the Chelsea pottery, as well as her father’s work in clay, may have stimulated her own interest in terra-cotta, which she continued to pursue in her later career. This plaque, initialed by her but undated, shows Venus and a swan carefully modeled in low relief. This vase is from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American art pottery donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and 2018. The works in the collection date from the mid-1870s through the 1950s. Together they comprise one of the most comprehensive and important assemblages of this material known.

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