
Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Strips of Undulating Honeycomb Pattern with Branch Offsets and Undulating Garlands of Pearls with Alternating Offsetting Wheat Ears and Pairs of Circles
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 garlands of honeycomb pattern of light tan color over a dark reddish-brown base with offsetting branches of dark reddish-brown color and undulating garlands of pearls with alternating offsetting wheat ears and pairs of circles over a bakcground of light tan color with dark-reddish brown stipples. The pearls and wheat ears are of white color; the circles are of purple, orange and green 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.