Flask with face

Jean-Joseph Carriès

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The grimacing face reveals the artist's gifts as a sculptor–his profession before becoming a ceramicist. Carriès made an important series of masks, inspired by Japanese Noh theater and the gargoyles and carved faces on Gothic church architecture. His stoneware flasks with faces are an offshoot of this production. The bearded face as a motif on a water jug has its origins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German stoneware vessels known as Beardman or Bellarmine jugs.

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