Jar

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the course of the sixteenth century a number of potteries making tin-enameled earthenware came into existence in Talavera de la Reina, a small town some sixty miles southwest of Madrid. The town supplied plain wares that were greatly admired for the beauty of their white surface—the "bianco"—and others that were decorated in a subdued palette of high-temperature greens, yellows, browns, blues, and purples. This jar and bowl (1983.469.1, .2) come from a pottery, so far unidentified by name, that seems to have obtained important orders over a fairly long period in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The characteristics of the factory are well exemplified in these objects: a fine bianco; a very beautiful blue—skillfully modulated from light to deep shades—that predominated in the early and mid-16oos; and an energetic freedom in the use of the brush point to draw in figures and background vegetation. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the prevailing to

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