Textile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and Circles

Textile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and Circles

Anonymous, Alsatian, 19th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rectangular sheet of paper with a textile design from a group, dated 1840, made in Mulhouse, Alsace which was an important nineteenth-century center for textile production in the Haut-Rhin region of France. The design is made of vertical strips of overlapping clouds rendered with dark reddish-brown stipples over a light tan base and with a strip of white circles with black borders running along the center of the clouds, which are framed by vertical strips of circles of black color over a dark reddish-brown ground.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and CirclesTextile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and CirclesTextile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and CirclesTextile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and CirclesTextile Design with Vertical Strips of Clouds and Circles

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.