During our two sessions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art lead by the curator Jeffrey Munger, we focused on porcelain and lacquer boxes and silver goods.

Although those two topics were not necessarily as pertinent to my group (Uses of Space) as it might have been to the two groups not focusing on people in space, the sessions were eye opening and provided a rich context for many of the objects that we have looked at in class. Pertinent examples from each topic were taken from the Met’s private collection and displayed, buffet-style, in front of us.

In the porcelain session, we learned about the development of Westerners’ passion for Chinese and Japanese porcelain, and how this demand lead to experimentation with the purpose of replicating the hard-paste porcelain style. We learned about the German Meissen factory as an example of these, and we had the great fortune of being able to observe certain examples from mere centimeters away.

As for the session on lacquer boxes and silver goods, we had the great fortune of seeing the boxes in motion as a fellow Met curator walked each example around, opening and closing them, allowing us to contemplate every last detail. The most fascinating ones to many students were – predictably enough – the most jewelled.