Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens Shapes

Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens Shapes

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 alternating vertical rows of undulating stylized wheat ears of light tan color with offsets of light reddish-brown color and undulating strips of pearls with alternating offsetting wheat ears and lens shapes over stylized palm leaves of light tan color with dark reddish-brown stipples. The pearls and wheat ears are of white color and the lens shapes are of orange and blue color with red outlines.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens ShapesTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens ShapesTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens ShapesTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens ShapesTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Rows of Undulating Stylized Wheat Ears and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Lens Shapes

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.