Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and Ovals

Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and Ovals

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 light tan color over a dark reddish-brown ground and undulating strips of pearls with some larger pearls and offsetting stylized leaves and ovals over a light tan ground. The small pearls and the stylized leaves are colored with white; the larger pearls are colored with red. The ovals are colored alternatingly with orange and purple. In the upper part of the design, the garlands of leaves are framed by palmettes of dark reddish-brown color and the background has stipples of the same color. The bottom part is left unfinished, with pencil tracing the lines that form the palmettes.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Textile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and OvalsTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and OvalsTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and OvalsTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and OvalsTextile Design with Alternating Vertical Garlands of Stylized Leaves and Undulating Strips of Pearls with Offsetting Stylized Leaves and Ovals

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.