Textile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and Pearls

Textile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and Pearls

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 basket weave pattern background of dark reddish-brown color with shades of stipples of light tan color. Small rosettes of light tan color with red outlines and a small black dot in the center, flanked by stylized leaves of the same color on the sides, lie over the ribbons that conform the basket weave. In the spaces between the ribbon are adorned with groups of four pearls of white color with black outlines aligned in the shape of lozenges.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and PearlsTextile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and PearlsTextile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and PearlsTextile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and PearlsTextile Design with Basketweave Pattern Background, Small Rosettes Flanked by Two Leaves and Pearls

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.