Sideboard

Sideboard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Unknown in American homes prior to the 1790s, the sideboard quickly became an essential component of the fashionable dining room. It provided space for the storage and display of expensive silver flatware, porcelain, and glassware used during the course of a meal. This massive and resplendent example with an accompanying knife box is a tour de force of early-nineteenth-century cabinetmaking. It includes a unique variety of ornament, from inlaid panels of mahogany veneer, marquetry, and silver-plated copper to verre églomisé, or reverse painting on glass on the panels flanking the central lunette.


The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.