Textile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three Pearls

Textile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three 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 an interlacing pattern of lines of light tan color outlined by two lines of dark reddish-brown color over a light tan ground, partially decorated with groups of three pearls of white color. The right part of the pattern is also rendered with spikes of dark reddish-brown color offsetting from the outlines and the background is decorated with stipples of dark reddish-brown color.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three PearlsTextile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three PearlsTextile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three PearlsTextile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three PearlsTextile Design with an Interlacing Pattern Partially Decorated with Groups of Three 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.