Sugar bowl with cover and tray

Europeans not only used sugar to sweeten coffee, tea, and chocolate imported from the Americas, India, and East Asia, but also to complement savory dishes and flavor fruit and desserts. The taste for sugar drove a rapid expansion of enslaved labor in the Caribbean.



Crystallized sugar was shipped in hard, paper-wrapped cones which had to be broken or cut into small pieces. Served in a bowl, small lumps of sugar were offered with tea and coffee, the hot liquids quickly dissolving the pieces of sugar. Alternatively, the imported sugar was refined in France and crushed into a fine powder for use as a condiment during the meal. This required a different type of serving vessel: either a caster with an openwork lid for sprinkling, or a lidded bowl with a pierced spoon for dusting.



By the middle of the 18th century, sugar bowls in the form of small, lidded tureens became fashionable. The trays on which these diminutive containers stood have frequently been separated. Here, the decoration as well as the Parisian silversmith’s marking on the bowl, lid, and tray all indicate a complete set. Despite the sinuous curves of the tureen and the matching tray still rooted in the Rococo style, the use of floral swags, wreaths, and ribbons suggest a transition to neoclassicism. The finial is formed by a cluster of strawberries, their sweetness indicating the tureen’s function as a container for sugar.



Daughter of one of the founders of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, Catherine D. Wentworth (1865–1948) was an art student and painter who lived in France for thirty years. She became one of the most important American collectors of eighteenth-century French silver and on her death in 1948 bequeathed part of her significant collection of silver, gold boxes, French furniture, and textiles to the Metropolitan Museum.