Plate 1753 - 1795

Curator: The Metropolitan Museum holds this "Plate", which dates roughly from 1753 to 1795 and is attributed to Fidelle Duvivier. What springs to mind for you when you see it? Editor: Quiet melancholy, I think. It’s such a stark, almost ghostly palette of white and gray, which throws the scene on the plate into high contrast. Curator: Indeed. Consider its place in society—decorative arts offered a readily consumable avenue for enjoying genre scenes and landscapes, themes previously reserved for paintings hung on walls, not adorning our dining tables! This piece invites discussion on domestic life and leisure, a slice of middle-class aspirations, perhaps? Editor: It's a fascinating point. But isn't there a quiet unease underlying these serene decorative scenes? Like the couple wandering near the shore towards what looks like a deserted windmill. Do they have a shared future, or do their stories diverge as surely as the road does? The simplicity is haunting! Curator: It's the suggestive simplicity of landscapes and genre paintings typical of this period. These vignettes, neatly framed within functional objects, offered an escape, perhaps. Editor: Escape? I see constraint more clearly! Encircling their vision. Does anyone look at this piece today, I wonder, and recall some lost possibility? We romanticize objects like these. We assume that it served food to families that had long forgotten its origin. Curator: These pieces are reminders of our own transient existence. Think of how history views the era which created it and compare that to a piece that you have had a connection with and wonder about its existence! A memento of its origins! Editor: You are right! I’m so happy our existence made us pause to muse at a small part of someone's decorative life in art.