Vase

Art Historical Context

This delicate vase, crafted in Parian porcelain between 1830 and 1870, exemplifies mid-19th-century American arts housed in The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Standing just 5½ x 2¾ inches, its petite scale made it ideal for Victorian parlors, where such elegant objects adorned mantelpieces and tabletops. Parian porcelain an unglazed, matte-white material imitating the translucency of Parian marble from the Greek island of Paros, allowed American potteries to produce affordable neoclassical-inspired wares that evoked classical antiquity without the heft or cost of stone. The v...