In any given exhibition season, the most talked-about shows tend to center on painting or sculpture — that is, the fine arts. The Poussin and Courbet shows now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are examples. Or people buzz about novelty exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art’s just-opened “Design and the Elastic Mind,” which highlights the “successful translation of disruptive innovation.” But for museumgoers who care little for blockbusters or novelty, decorative arts exhibitions often offer deep rewards with the bonus that the shows are seldom crowded. There is currently a peculiarly rich selection of good decorative arts shows, particularly ones drawn from that most decorative of centuries, the 18th.

The Met is on a roll, as it has remounted important parts of the permanent collection and drawn from its infinite reserves several small, sparkling exhibitions. “Silversmiths to the Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808–1842,” organized by the Winterthur Museum in Delaware and on view through May 4, is a perfect exhibition of its kind. It chronicles the careers of America’s first great silversmiths. In the early 19th century, presentation silver — bowls, vases, and urns — commemorated glorious achievements. If America was to compete in excellence, innovation, and martial might with Britain and France, then we’d have to be able to make silver objects as good as theirs.

Enter Fletcher and Gardiner. The Met has contextualized their works by placing them beside contemporaneous European pieces, furniture, portrait paintings, and so on, so as to bring out the American silver’s special qualities, its republican simplicity and Jacksonian jauntiness. Even when they drew from European models — as, for example, in their enormous debts to Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, and to Giovanni Battista Piranesi — Fletcher and Gardiner never succumbed to imperial bombast. This is so even in the most elaborate pieces, including the remarkable Erie Canal vases commissioned in 1824 by the “merchants of Pearl Street” to honor DeWitt Clinton for his role in the making of a greater public works project than any European nation had ever undertaken.

That same year, the Marquis de Lafayette made his famous return trip to America. The excellent Lafayette exhibition at the New-York Historical Society is far from a decorative arts show (though it contains some fine examples). But it helps to place “Silversmiths to the Nation” in context. Note, for example, that one of the two galleries given to Fletcher and Gardiner contains John Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama, which Lafayette visited in New York 184 years ago! In concert, the two shows offer a staggeringly rich lesson in American history.

The Met offers “The Art of Time: European Clocks and Watches from the Collection” (through April 27), featuring English, French, Dutch, Swiss, and German clocks and timepieces made between the 14th and 18th centuries. A Nikolaus Schmidt clock bearing a gilded Madonna and child statuette dates from circa 1620–25 and is from Augsburg. Just then that city was enduring unspeakable misery brought on by plague and the Thirty Years’ War. To look upon such a beautiful object created amid such conditions inspires the viewer with a profound appreciation of the human spirit. In another vein, the 18th-century English “Automaton in the Form of a Chariot Pushed by a Chinese Attendant and Set with a Clock,” made by the slightly mad James Cox (whose fans included Dr. Johnson), will dazzle you and make you smile.

Planets align in both expected and unexpected ways in the exhibition world. The concurrent reinstallations of the Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts at the Met and of the Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection were eagerly anticipated by the city’s Francophiles. Together they bring to life the French 18th century. An example of the unexpected is that one of the Frick’s prized recent acquisitions, part of the reinstalled Fragonard Room, is a gorgeous clock by the master clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute, with figures by Clodion. “The Art of Time” features a Lepaute clock with a wonderful bronze cherub at whose feet lies a chart of the lunar eclipse of April 1, 1764, as calculated by Lepaute’s wife, who was an astronomer.

The French 18th century receives further due at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where the just-opened “Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008” is up through July 6. There are many splendid things here that may profitably be viewed alongside works from the other exhibitions. As with so many names of art movements (or religious ones, too), “rococo” began as a derogatory term. Coined in the early 19th century, when the taste for the style’s richness and flamboyance had ebbed, the term derives from the Italian “barocco,” or baroque. In the best of rococo (and some of it, even I admit, is over-the-top for over-the-top’s sake) the French integrated movement, passion, drama, intimacy, and an exacting appreciation of the human form in a way that is a highlight of Western art. Jean-Joseph de Saint-Germain’s gilded bronze candelabrum from around 1750 seamlessly weaves architectural and plant forms, cherubs, and birds, all in vigorous motion, in a work of astonishing craftsmanship. Unlike in the other shows mentioned here, the Cooper-Hewitt’s curators don’t let the work speak for itself so much as they seek to divine its essences, finding, for example, that they are in evidence in contemporary works by Frank Gehry and Jeff Koons, to which I can only say I don’t get that.

Further 18th-century splendor, this time English, may be found in Midtown at the UBS Art Gallery, which features the fine exhibition “Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle,” a remarkably thorough overview of one of his century’s truly representative men — artist, scientist, entrepreneur, and humanitarian. (And he was Charles Darwin’s maternal grandfather, to top it off.) Wedgwood’s name ranks with those of the architect Robert Adam and the sculptor John Flaxman (some of whose works for Wedgwood are in this show) as representative of Britain’s great flowering of Neoclassicism. All the progressive force of Wedgwood’s mind and personality resulted in a grand project of recovering the antique. His brilliant and technologically innovative creamware and jasperware pieces were vehicles for the delivery of intricate Grecian and Roman devices — themselves thought appropriately emblematic of democracy. As in “Silversmiths to the Nation,” the wealth of supporting material helps tell a complex and fascinating story that must not be missed.

Finally, the American Numismatic Society has mounted, in magnificent rooms in the Federal Reserve Bank (please remember to bring all the identification documents you possess), “‘I Suppose I Shall Be Impeached for It’: Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and America’s Most Beautiful Coin,” through March 31. We learn in fantastic detail how Saint-Gaudens’s $10 and $20 gold pieces came to be. The show offers letters, drawings, successive relief strikings, models of Saint-Gaudens’s statuary, photographs, and ancient coins that inspired him, among much else. New Yorkers know Saint-Gaudens as the American master who gave us our noblest works of public art, the Farragut Monument in Madison Square and the Sherman Monument in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza. The sculptor’s domestic commissions yielded stunning fireplaces that can be seen in the Met and at the New York Palace Hotel. The coin exhibition allows us to see his small-scale work together with the medium- and large-scale work we know so well.

No one wouldn’t want to see Poussin and “Design and the Elastic Mind.” But I wonder if many of the quieter shows around town might not afford greater sustenance and delight.