Chess set

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The king, knights, and pawns are all warriors, the queen, a lady, and the bishops shaven priests. Exceptionally, there is no suggestion of a horse in the knights. The rooks consist of square towers surmounted by two incurving hornlike projections, which on Chinese and Japanese buildings are sometimes in the form of fish. These same details appear on the top of one of the towers borne by the elephants in another set, 48.174.160a–p, aa–pp (q.v.). The cutting of the ball element of the pedestals suggests the cutting common in Chinese ivory sets. The set was acquired in Shanghai between 1920 and 1939 and probably was made in Japan for Chinese re-export.

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