Nécessaire

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fashionable in eighteenth-century Europe were so-called nécessaires de poche (pocket necessaries)—small caskets made of precious materials and fitted with tiny implements for grooming, writing, or sewing. Beneath a mirror-lined cover, the interior of this casket contains an inkwell and sand shaker, pen, pencil, clasp knife, cut-glass seal, snuff spoon, ear spoon, bodkin, tweezers, file, two-leaved ivory tablet, and a patch box.

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