Textile Design with Vertical Scrolling Garlands of Branches with Stylized Tulips and 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 vertical scrolling garlands of branches of light tan color with an offsetting shade rendered with stipples of dark reddish-brown color decorated with stylized tulips with stems and two leaves decorated with pearls, over a background with dots of dark reddish-brown color over a base of light tan color with dark reddish-brown stipples. The tulips are colored with yellow and purple and have red outlines, and the pearls are colored with white.

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