Watch

Nicolas Bernard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A very few watchcases survive with this variety of openwork design of tour-de-force raised-and-dotted enamel. The dial, too, with black numerals on a pure white enamel chapter ring and a deep red basse-taille enamel center, is the product of a highly skilled artisan, who was almost certainly working in Paris about the middle of the seventeenth century. The pre-balance spring movement of the watch is signed Nicolas Bernard AParis. While there are several clockmakers named Bernard, or Benard, known to have been working in Paris in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there is no record of a Nicolas Bernard before 1636, when a man by that name was made a master clockmaker there. By the time of his death in 1670, he had become a merchant clockmaker and a burgher of Paris.

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