Box with eighty-one game counters

Meissen Manufactory

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The card game l’Hombre was a fashionable pastime in the eighteenth century, and special boxes were created at the Meissen porcelain manufacture to hold the necessary counters. Five playing cards decorate the lid; the one on top, which represents the King of Hearts, is based on a French deck of cards made for the German market by Claude Valentin of Lyon about 1650. For the Ace of Spades, the painter used an original card bearing the Saxon tax stamp that was imposed on all imported playing cards. The different counters were stored in four small individual boxes, now missing.

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