
Textile Design with a Stippled Background and Vertical Stripes of Alternating Circles of Framed by a Ribbon Adorned with Pearls Separated by Undulating Garlands of Ribbons
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 a background of light tan color with dark reddish-brown stipples and vertical stripes of alternating circles of dark red color framed by a black ribbon adorned with pearls of white color separated by undulating garlands of ribbons of light tan color over a stippled base of dark reddish-brown color.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.