Console table

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Supported on one or two legs, console tables need to be attached to the wall for stability and are considered to be part of the interior decoration of a room. They were made by a special group of joiners, menuisiers en bâtiments (litt. building carpenters) responsible for the fixed elements in the interior such as paneling, pier glasses and console tables. Unlike other members of the guild, these craftsmen were not required to stamp their output and for that reason it is rarely known who created such works. These console tables are of identical design except in size. They were among the few neoclassical consoles in the model collection of woodwork, paneling and seat furniture of Maison Leys, a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave the panels with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art