Charger

F. Gadesden

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This large dish is decorated with six sunflowers depicted at different stages of maturity, from a bud to a fully opened bloom. The sunflower was a popular motif within the Aesthetic Movement, which embraced the concept that art should exist solely for its own sake, and sunflowers appear frequently on ceramics, furniture, and metalwork of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This dish is signed by F. Gadesden, whose name is not recorded but who may have been an amateur ceramic painter working on a blank produced by a commercial kiln.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art