Box

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most common small storage unit in the seventeenth century was the rectangular box with a hinged lid. Boxes provided a place to keep valuables, documents, writing implements, books, and small articles of apparel. Except for one rare example decorated with applied moldings, these boxes are carved utilizing a vocabulary of stylized plant forms and simple geometric shapes. The boxes are all of simple five-board nailed construction and have a deep association with America’s so-called "Pilgrim Century." They were avidly sought after by the earliest collectors of seventeenth-century American oak furniture, hence their acquisition by the museum in 1910 as part of the foundation for the museum’s collection of early American furniture.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art