A look at John Singer Sargent’s formative years in Paris, a city that helped spark his rise to the nineteenth-century art world.

As European and American interest in Asian art grew in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Western consumers coveted expensive lacquerware for its gloss, durability, and rich ornament. This edition of the Bulletin examines the evolving discourse surrounding japanned furniture, an artform cultivated by European and North American tradesmen that was inspired by luxury lacquer items from China and Japan. Using resin from native conifers or imported sandarac, copal, and shellac, they imitated the medium and the motifs used in traditional lacquer objects. Featuring more than a dozen examples of japanned chests, tables, and mirrors, American Japanned Furniture discusses the works’ patronage and aesthetic origins while also uncovering a new artistic attribution to Thomas Johnston for key examples in The Met’s Collection– a discovery which not only sheds new light on Johnston’s work, but also helps shape a new understanding of the Museum’s japanned furniture.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 58 include an investigation of how boldly colored orange glass and enamels were produced at Qing imperial workshops; a rare portrait of Joanna de Silva, an Indian servant, by British artist William Wood in 1792; and the extraordinary discovery of a hoard of German silver cups and tankards hidden for more than two hundred years.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 57 include essays on a crimson velvet “cloth of gold” associated with the Tudor dynasty; an exquisite pair of malachite torchères commissioned by the Russian Demidov family; and a drawing on muslin by Matȟó Nážiŋ detailing the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 57 include essays on a crimson velvet “cloth of gold” associated with the Tudor dynasty; an exquisite pair of malachite torchères commissioned by the Russian Demidov family; and a drawing on muslin by Matȟó Nážiŋ detailing the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2020–2022 include the Mantuan Roundel by Gian Marco Cavalli, a recently rediscovered tour de force from the early Renaissance; the archive of photographer James Van Der Zee, one of the most celebrated chroniclers of Black life in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance; a pair of sculptures by the renowned contemporary American artist Robert Gober; Thomas Sully’s magisterial portrait of Queen Victoria; and Poussin’s Agony in the Garden, one of only two accepted works by the artist in oil on copper. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.

A reckoning of the central role of enslaved and free Black potters in the long-standing stoneware traditions of Edgefield, South Carolina Recentering the development of industrially scaled Southern pottery traditions around enslaved and free Black potters working in the mid-nineteenth century, this catalogue presents groundbreaking scholarship and new perspectives on stoneware made in Edgefield, South Carolina. Among the remarkable works included are a selection of regional face vessels as well as masterpieces by enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who signed, dated, and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. Essays on the production, collection, dispersal, and reception of stoneware from Edgefield offer a critical look at what it means to collect, exhibit, and interpret objects made by enslaved artisans. Several featured contemporary works inspired by or related to Edgefield stoneware attest to the cultural and historical significance of this body of work, and an interview with acclaimed contemporary artist Simone Leigh illuminates its continued relevance.

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career. Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.