The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the perfect place to look at colonial American furnishings. Besides the period rooms, there is open storage that translates into rows of glass cases filled with multiple examples of household furnishings. The computer banks allow for specific searches and when asked for what was made prior to 1800 came up with lots of examples of silver tankards and spoons, pewter plates and porrigers, all produced in New York City. There is also a decent sampling of Chinese import plates and platters and English porcelain that I would imagine Jane’s parents, being Scottish and also Royalist, might favor.
I was struck with how beautiful the objects are and realized I was responding not to the design but to the materials. Everything was metal, glass, wood, ceramic, or natural fibers. The computers were the only plastic objects to be seen.
