Side table

John Wildsmith

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The specimen-marble table top was supplied by John Wildsmith in 1759. Affluent Englishmen are known to have collected marble and pietre dure tabletops while visiting Italy on their grand tours. Lord Coventry never traveled to Italy, however, and this tabletop is a rare example of London manufacture, documented by the payment to the craftsman John Wildsmith in 1759. Wildsmith, who was also responsible for the marble mantelpiece in the tapestry room, inlaid 176 squares of differently colored hardstone specimens in a diagonal checkerboard pattern in order to display "all the curious sorts." The "large frame . . . on turned legs, neatly carved and the whole gilt in burnished gold" was supplied much later, in 1794, by the London firm of John Mayhew and William Ince.

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