Table

Adam Weisweiler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This side table demonstrates the persistent taste for the exotic and Chinoiserie during the reign of Louis XVI, a period more typically defined by the restrained Neoclassical forms inspired by ancient Rome and Greece. Attributed to the famed Parisian cabinetmaker Adam Weisweiler, the oak table is veneered with ebony, incorporates panels of black and gold Japanese lacquer, and is set with strips of pewter and gilt-bronze mounts. It has a marble top. A small drawer is located in the frieze, and the four tapered octagonal legs are joined by an interlacing stretcher mounted with a gilt-bronze urn (possibly a replacement). The central lacquer panel located in the frieze, paired with the two gilt-bronze panels featuring fauns and trophies, demonstrates how furniture under the reign of Louis XVI combined lacquer from the Far East with classical motifs from antiquity. Seen with the museum’s vases chinois, a pair of vases produced around 1791 at Sèvres that sought to mimic the effects of black lacquer (1971.206.23), this desk typifies the black and gold aesthetics that briefly prevailed in the last decades of the ancien régime

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