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Although best known as a ceramic decorator and as the founder of the Rookwood Pottery Company in Cincinnati, Maria Longworth Nichols Storer experimented with metal between 1897 and 1900. Storer created small- and large-scale decorative objects made of tin with copper and silver electroplated surfaces while living in Brussels and in Madrid. She employed Yosakichi Asano, a metalworker from Kanazawa, Japan, to assist with the metal fabrication techniques. Before donating the works to the Art Museum, she displayed many of them at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, where they received a gold medal.

The decorative subject matter is derived from classical, Art Nouveau, and Japanese sources, especially the latter. Storer’s fascination with the grotesque, seen in her earlier pottery designs, is evidenced further in her metalwork. Many of the objects’ surfaces are decorated with monkeys and grotesque aquatic animals, enhanced with patination and with encrusted pearls and semiprecious stones. Such treatment of the decorative motifs produced a body of work with richly textured surfaces and a three-dimensional, sculptural quality.