Textile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical Stripes

Textile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical Stripes

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 up of a tartan background of dark reddish-brown color over a light tan base and two verical stripes made of two lines framed in dark red and with a black line in-between the two. The two lines are of yellow color in one of the stripes and purple color in the other stripe. The intersections between the thicker horizontal and vertical lines of the tartan background are adorned with two squares of white color and black outlines.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical StripesTextile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical StripesTextile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical StripesTextile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical StripesTextile Design with Tartan Background and Vertical Stripes

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.