This gilded goblet was made for a special dinner in honor of Andrew Carnegie given by the Engineers’ Club of New York on December 9, 1907. The name of the club and the date of the dinner can be seen along the edge of the goblet’s base. Carnegie had donated $450,000 for the organization’s new...

In July of 1913, Arthur Sanders, a gaffer at Tiffany Studios, was sent on a dream of a business trip. He traveled to Hamilton, Bermuda to study marine life through a glass-bottomed boat. Sanders observed the beauty of the underwater world so that he could later reproduce it in glass when back in Corona, New...

Christopher Dresser, a disciple of Owen Jones, was an early design reformer and is considered by some to be the first industrial designer. In addition to designing wallpapers, textiles, carpets, ceramics, and metalwork for a wide variety of European and American manufacturers, he published several influential books, including The Art of Decorative Design (1862), Principles...

At first glance, you might think this is a sauce bowl or pitcher used at the dinner table. However, it is something quite different all together, and would most definitely be an unwelcome addition to a table spread. The bourdalou, in fact, was a type of chamber pot that was specifically used by women up...

In the mid-1820s, the development of press-molding radically changed the American glass industry, increasing output and bringing affordable decorative glasswares within the reach of a broader consumer market. In this new production process, workers placed gathers of molten glass in a machine press and applied pressure, forcing the glass into the contours of a mold....

The French designer Edgar Brandt spurred a revival of interest in interior furnishings made of iron in the 1920s. His participation in the 1925 Paris Exposition won him great praise. Brandt’s ironwork was admired throughout the fair; he designed the gates of the front entrance, his work featured in Ruhlmann’s pavilion, and he staged an...

This glass vase was made in the 17th or 18th century in Iran. It has a delicate applied glass rope ornament at the base of the neck, and is intricately decorated with gold enamel in a diamond and star pattern. The vase was free-blown, which means that it was produced without the use of a...

This brass foil decoration in what we know as a paisley form represents an example of the designs created by Lockwood de Forest, the foremost exponent of Indian design in America during the last quarter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. De Forest went to India in 1881 on his honeymoon to see first-hand...

The early years of the twentieth century were the high point in children’s room decoration. The Industrial Revolution brought about increased wealth, and children were given their own rooms for the first time. The decoration of a child’s room was supposed to be stimulating and educational, and needed to clearly designate the space as belonging...