Textile Design with a Pattern of Seamless Lozenges Formed by a Undulating Ribbons with Dots, Decorated with Octagons with Pearls on the Vertices

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 seamless lozenges formed by undulating ribbons with alternating branch offsets and dots of light tan color. The lozenges are rendered with stipples of dark reddish-brown color over a light tan base and decorated with octagons that align to form alternating vertical rows. The octagons are colored in purple, green and orange, some of them framed with pearls of white color on the vertices.

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art