This is the second volume in a series of handbooks focusing on particular aspects of the collections of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, offering historical and aesthetic perspectives. The Metropolitan Museum of Art entered the field of collecting French Renaissance and post-Renaissance ceramics in 1884 with some important purchases from the celebrated collection of Sir Andrew Fountaine. However, more than ninety percent of the accessions that followed were either given or bequeathed. The vast collections of J. Pierpont Morgan, given to the Museum in 1917, included the private collection of Gaston Le Breton, a leading nineteenth-century historian of French ceramic art and former director of the Musée Céramique of the city of Rouen. Among other individuals who have contributed entire collections to the Museum are R. Thornton Wilson, who had a passion for single objects of outstanding beauty and rarity, and Julia A. Berwind, who collected broadly in certain categories. A pair of monumental Nevers ewers purchased with the aid of the Sampson Fund, were given in memory of Charles E. Sampson specifically for acquiring rare examples of fine European ceramics. To these and other donors the Museum is indebted for the formation of an interesting range of works representing the progress of French ceramic art in the seventeenth century. [This book was originally published in 1987 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]