Frans Snyders, Fruit Still Life with Squirrel Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Our mission is to preserve and promote the artistry and craftsmanship of traditional decorative arts.

Our suppliers represent an exclusive cadre of artisans dedicated to maintaining the inimitable quality of goods handmade according to ancient technologies and techniques.

Our clients are public and private collectors, dealers, and design professionals of particular acumen.

In this age of mechanized production and digital design, the decorative arts are largely overlooked; but for most of human history, craftsmen created the thousands of objects required by society.

A craft depends on society. If society does not seek the craft, the artisans and the skills, no matter how exceptional, will disappear.

As the industrial design sector of a pre-industrial age, artisanal workshops interpreted, and in some cases dictated, the evolution of taste and styles in their communities. Society, especially the ruling classes, made demands, and craftsmen responded to the best of their technical and artistic abilities.

The decorative arts, such things as ceramics, glassware, tapestries, furniture, metalwork and jewelry, were not so easily distinguishable from the major arts of painting, sculpture and architecture as they may seem to us today. Patrons of the fine arts also subsidized workshops where artisans were encouraged to push the technological and aesthetic boundaries of their craft.

Today’s world offers few opportunities for the kind of sponsorship craftsmen once enjoyed. Master artisans are increasingly forced to abandon time-consuming, costly methods for more efficient, semi-industrialized processes that require less artistic proficiency. The result of this compromise are goods that only nominally resemble the decorative arts of the past.

Our handmade reproductions are created using the same techniques and materials as the antique originals. The exceptional quality evident in each historically faithful detail is the product of extensive research and decades of experience.

The craftsmen responsible for these wares are guardians of the past. Without sustainable economic outlets, their skills, passed for centuries from master to apprentice, father to son, will be lost.

Prie seeks to provide those markets.

Prie provides a forum for appreciation and exchange, safeguarding and sponsorship.

Prie is the conduit through which time-honored treasures are matched with modern patrons of the decorative arts.