Glove tray

This oval-footed salver is known as a gantière or glove tray which would have been part of a large toilet service.



The term toilette describes the sets of matching objects which were used for daily grooming in the bedroom. During the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth, the toilet set evolved into one of the most fashionable luxury accessories and was an eloquent symbol of the owner’s social status.

Toilet sets comprised boxes, perfume bottles, brushes, and other pieces for cosmetics and hair dressing and might contain as many as thirty different articles.



This glove tray is a rare survival. Its strapwork decoration is influenced by the designs of Jean Bérain. Additionally, at this time, small cast medallions with heads of Roman men and women in profile as well as figures of putti were frequently applied to decorative objects, as in this example.



To ensure timely delivery, it was common practice for toilet sets to be made by several silversmiths subcontracted by a merchant or a master silversmith. Each silversmith would receive designs but may also have drawn on his reserves and applied decorative details and engravings to existing items in order to conform with other objects in the set.



Supplied by a number of Parisian silversmiths during the 1720’s, several other items (48.187.269,.316,.21,.22) in the Wentworth Collection may originally have been part of a large toilet set including this glove tray.



Daughter of one of the founders of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, Catherine D. Wentworth (1865-1948) was an art student and painter who lived in France for thirty years. She became one of the most important American collectors of eighteenth-century French silver and on her death in 1948 bequeathed part of her significant collection of silver, gold boxes, French furniture and textiles to the Metropolitan Museum. The collection is particularly strong in domestic silver, much of it provincial, and includes a number of rare early pieces.