Textile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron Background

Textile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron Background

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 vertical undulating garlands of pearls of red color and inverted teardrops framed with pearls with offsetting wheat ears separated by a vertical zig-zagging ribbon of dark reddish-brown color with light tan outlines over a chevron background of light tan color with stipples of dark reddish-brown color. The teardrops are colored with orange, purple and green color and have red outlines; the pearls around them are colored with white. The wheat ears are of white color.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron BackgroundTextile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron BackgroundTextile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron BackgroundTextile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron BackgroundTextile Design with Vertical Undulating Garlands of Pearls and Inverted Teardrops Framed with Pearls with Offsetting Wheat Ears Separated by a Vertical Zig-Zagging Ribbon over a Chevron Background

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.