Chest

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Twentieth-century American collectors prized the distinctive eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century pottery, fraktur, and furniture made by immigrants of Switzerland, the Palatinate, and the Upper Rhine Valley of Germany, who had settled throughout southeastern Pennsylvania. A sampling of this Pennsylvania German "folk art" later appeared in the Index of American Design, a Federal Arts Project of the New Deal era, which helped to popularize aesthetics among modern collectors and artists. The unicorn and men-on-horseback design on this painted chest are motifs often depicted on marriage chests created in Berks County.

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