The Robert Lehman Collection, Volume XV: European and Asian Decorative Arts

This highly anticipated volume completes the comprehensive series, a model of its kind, cataloguing the extraordinary diverse holdings in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. Presented here are more than four hundred works in the decorative arts dating from antiquity to the twentieth century and ranging from intricately enameled watches (one was once owned by King Louis XIV) and exquisitely painted and jeweled snuffboxes to monumentally carved wood wedding chests, originating throughout Europe and Asia. Highlights include a superb seventeenth-century oval-shaped watch decorated with enamels by the master Susanne de Court of Limoges; a dazzling domed cup supported by a carved aragonite figure of a bearded Turk, replete with jewels and precious stones, crafted in early eighteenth-century Germany; and a French secrétaire from the 1780s set with painted enamels from the famed Sèvres Manufactory.

Foremost scholars provide expert analyses of the works of art, including notable reassessments of Renaissance jewelry and furniture. In-depth discussions, many elucidated by new photography, constitute a fitting finale to this venerable series documenting one of the most distinguished privately assembled art collections in the United States.

Provenance information, exhibition histories, and references are provided, and selected comparative illustrations are incorporated. The volume also includes a bibliography and an index.