Textile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with Pearls

Textile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated 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 pattern is made up of a honeycomb pattern formed with rosettes of light tan color with offsetting thorns rendered with stipples of dark reddish-brown color over a light tan base. The center of the hexagons forming the honeycomb pattern are decorated with smaller hexagons framed by twelve pearls and adorned with a pearl in the center that form alternating vertical rows. These hexagons are colored with black, the pearls surrounding them are colored with white, and the pearl in the center is of gold color.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with PearlsTextile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with PearlsTextile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with PearlsTextile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with PearlsTextile Design with a Honeycomb Pattern Formed with Small Rosettes and with Alternating Rows of Hexagons Decorated with 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.