Pair of scallop shells

Paul de Lamerie

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, fashionable English households adopted a taste for French cuisine. Silver dinner services were expanded to accommodate the new, elaborate sauces, soups, gratins, and fricassees. These naturalistic shells may have been used to serve oysters, sauce, or possibly butter.

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