Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Branches Decorated with Quatrefoils with an Ornamental Frame and Rosettes with 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 alternating vertical garlands of stylized leaves of black color with light tan outlines and offsetting branches of tan color decorated with pearls and smaller vertical garlands of branches of light tan color with offsetts colored with tan. One of the larger garlands is decorated with quatrefoils of cream color outlined with black containing a small rosette of black color flanked by two stylized leaves inside an ornamental frame of red color with outlines of cream color. One of the smaller garlands is decorated with small stylized flowers of five petals of red color with five pearls as pistils. The pearls are all of white color. The repetitions of the garlands are left incomplete.

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