Celery vase

Boston & Sandwich Glass Company

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The development of pressed glass during the 1820s was the most innovative technological improvement since the invention of the blowpipe two thousand years earlier. Credited as an American development, it revolutionized glassmaking, taking the process out of the hands of the individual glass blower, and enabling the shape and decoration of an object to be made in a single swift process. Cut glass provides the patterns for the earliest pressed vessels, such as this celery vase. It features repeated designs of what appear to be tulip blossoms (although collectors often refer to this as the Cape Cod Lily) and leaves. The Boston and Sandwich Glass Company produced quantities of lacy pressed glass. Based upon fragments found at Sandwich factory site, the celery is attributed to that firm. It is one of a very few examples known.

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