April from a set of The Months of Lucas

Master of the Months of Lucas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This tapestry was part of a set of twelve celebrating courtly pastimes, each dedicated to a month of the year. Here, courtiers enjoy the mild mid-spring weather of April; they venture out of the castle to go boating, gather flowers, and make music with a recorder, a lute and a dulcimer. In contrast with these leisurely dalliances, a shepherd leading his flock to the fields and a maid milking toward the left hint at busy agricultural life reawakening after atrophied winter. October, from the same series, is on display nearby. Though woven in eighteenth-century Paris, these hangings were designed after a sixteenth-century Netherlandish tapestry set (now lost) in the French royal collection. The resulting works winningly combine a Renaissance sensibility in subject matter, compositional style, and clothing fashions with a lush Rococo border, a rainbow palette, and virtuosi weaving techniques more typical of 1730s France.

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