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 lumps 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.



From about 1770, a form of sugar container which was popular in England, became fashionable in France. This model consisted of a blue glass liner set in a small openwork silver basket, as seen in this pair of sugar bowls by the silversmith Pierre Vallières of 1778-1779. Fully embracing the neo-classical design vocabulary, the decoration comprises wreathed oval cartouches, ribbons, flowers, and drapery swags. The split handles are embellished with beading and acanthus. Hoof feet support the frame with its domed cover and flower and fruit finial. The tray has a broad molded rim interrupted with clusters of mulberries.



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.