Box

John Thurston

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Small, rectangular oak boxes with hinged lids were common in seventeenth-century households, where they held important items such as documents, writing implements, books, jewelry, and currency. Like chests with carved decoration, boxes displayed a vocabulary of stylized plant forms and simple geometric shapes. Foliated S-scrolls, as single elements or paired—as on the front of this box and the sides of the cabinet to its right—were widely used.

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