This complete set of funerary procession figures is a unique addition that fills one of the few gaps in the Museum's tomb sculpture holdings. It represents a typical funerary procession for a high-ranking member of the Chinese aristocracy during the Ming dynasty.

Silver caskets of this type were produced in pairs from the seventeenth century as components of large toilet services. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, caskets were also being made and marketed as independent objects designed to contain everything from manuscripts to jewelry. Renaissance-style caskets similar to this one were tour-de-force accomplishments of the gold- and silversmiths who made them.

Centerpieces or surtout such as this one, whether in silver, faience, or porcelain, functioned both as visual statements of the owners’ wealth and importance and as elaborate condiment sets. The eight indentations on this surtout, a feature unique to this model, were intended for salt and pepper.

This large vase was made at the Meissen porcelain factory, the factory founded in Dresden by the royal decree of August II (the Strong), elector of Saxony and king of Poland (1670–1733) in 1710. Many of the decorative styles employed by the factory reflected the current fashions for such things as Asian art and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings. The decoration on this vase, a scene of three men drinking at an outdoor table, is in a style popularized by the Flemish painter David Teniers II (1610–1690).

Giuseppe Mazzuoli created this terracotta sculpture as an advanced preparatory study for a marble group that he began for his own amusement. Much admired by Roman art lovers, the finished marble was acquired for the king of Portugal for placement in the garden of the Colonial Hospital in Lisbon.

The Museum has recently acquired an elaborate eighteenth-century side chair commissioned by the Revolutionary War hero General John Cadwalader (1742–1786) and his fashionable wife Elizabeth (Lloyd), whose spectacular Philadelphia town house—among the most extravagantly decorated in the American colonies—was a critical meeting place for the Continental Congress and eventual signers of the United States Constitution.