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Anna Maria Garthwaite

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the early 1700s, after centuries as a minor silk weaving center, London had surpassed Italy for fashionable silk production, with English and immigrant Huguenot weavers rivaling their popular French counterparts. The elegant silks on view here epitomize the work of the skillful designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Her painted patterns survive in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, dated and annotated with technical notes and often with the names of weavers to whom Garthwaite sold her designs.

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