Furnishing silk

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the mid-eighteenth century, French silks made in Tours, Nîmes, and above all Lyon dominated taste Europe-wide, increasingly surpassing Italian work. Such was the demand for colorful and naturalistically decorated furnishing silks like this example, as well as asymmetrically patterned dress silks, that it has been estimated that there were approximately 8,000 looms in Lyon by 1739. More than one third of the city’s inhabitants was involved in the silk industry as weavers and, more tangentially, spinners, dyers, merchants, and retailers. This silk was displayed in European Textiles and Costume Figures, on view at the School of Industrial Arts in 1935, and at Walton High School in 1939. [Elizabeth Cleland, 2020]

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