Sauce Dish

Union Porcelain Works

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Union Porcelain Works was one of the most important and inventive American porcelain manufacturers in the second-half of the nineteenth century. In addition to their imaginative works designed by the German-born artistic director, Karl H. L. Müller, the firm’s mainstay was the production of heavy porcelain hotel dinnerware. This extensive service was made by Thomas Carll Smith, head of the Union Porcelain Works, as a gift to his daughter, Pastora Forest Smith Chace. The neoclassical decoration of the gilt bellflower and basket motif is complimented by turquoise enamel. Unlike the firm’s more eccentric and lavish designs created for their display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, the pottery favored a more restrained classical style for their dinner services. This service descended in the Chace family.

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