The Cleveland Museum of Art opens one of its rarest shows of the year on Sunday, Oct. 25, when Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier: Rococo Goldsmith in Focus brings together works by the 18th-century French goldsmith whose surviving pieces are so scarce that a handful of them in one room counts as an event. The free exhibition runs through March 14, 2027, in the museum’s Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery.
Meissonnier, born in Italy in 1695 and dead by 1750, was the defining silversmith of the Rococo style, and most of his work was melted down in the upheavals that followed his era. The exhibition is built around the museum’s famed silver soup tureen, decorated with the very vegetables and animals meant to go into it, and made between 1735 and 1738 with silversmiths Pierre-François Bonnestrenne and Henry-Guillaume Adnet.
Joining the tureen are two treasures with royal histories: a newly acquired gold box made for the queen of Spain, and a rock crystal ewer that Marie Antoinette kept in her private apartment. Bringing the three together gives visitors a compact survey of what Meissonnier could do across silver, gold and carved crystal, all of it swirling with the shells, waves and vegetation that became his signature.
The tureen at the center of the show, formally a covered tureen on stand, or pot-à-oille, is held by the museum through its Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund. Its surface ripples like water, crowned with game and garden produce rendered in silver — a piece of table sculpture meant for aristocratic dining rooms where the food and the serving piece were both part of the performance.
The exhibition is part of the museum’s 110th anniversary year program in University Circle, a season that also includes The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends, on view through Jan. 24, 2027. Focus Gallery shows are deliberately small and deep, built to let visitors study a single artist or moment closely rather than survey a whole century.
General admission to the Cleveland Museum of Art is free every day, a policy in place since the museum opened in 1916 for, in its founding words, the benefit of all the people, forever. The museum is at 11150 East Boulevard in Cleveland.
For Northeast Ohio visitors, the Meissonnier show offers a rare arithmetic: objects that almost never travel, by a maker whose work mostly no longer exists, on view free of charge for nearly five months. The exhibition closes March 14, 2027.