Water-lily textile

Associated Artists

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the late 1870s, Louis C. Tiffany collaborated with textile designer Candace Wheeler to form an artistic decorating business known as Louis C. Tiffany & Company, Associated Artists. Within a few years, Wheeler branched out and established her own textile enterprise, known simply as the Associated Artists. The design of undulating vines, leaves, and blossoms of water-lilies on this fabric sample exemplifies the firm’s line of "shadow silks," a type of textile where the pattern is only printed on the warp threads. This technique was praised in an 1885 issue of Art Amateur for its ability to render "a sense of life and motion, with gradations of color instead of light and shade."

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art