City Park is a repeating sidewall paper designed by Dan Funderbrugh for Flavor Paper. It was acquired by the Cooper Hewitt in 2007 and is among a variety of more modern papers that have been obtained by the museum as of late. Collecting from all time periods is essential in keeping museum records up to...
Ragged, curvy and relentless, the pussy willow catkins in this print are symbolic of the battle for spring that marks the month of March. Designed by Theodor van Hoytema (Dutch, 1863-1917) for a 1911 calendar, one can understand the month it represents even without translating the Dutch word at the top: “Maart” or March. Known...
This sampler was worked in 1812 by Mary Hamilton at the Maytown, Pennsylvania, school of Catherine Welshans (who became Catherine Welshans Buchanan after her 1813 marriage). The central scene depicts a woman, fashionably attired in a feathered headdress, standing beneath a tree. The border is made up of compartmentalized motifs, including baskets of flowers, flowering...
Queen Anne’s Lace recalls the simple charm of a photogram, but it is technically multi-layered and complex. The brilliant red background is entirely hand-pulled with the drag-box. Slight overlapping of the bands of color creates pinstripes of darker red. The flowers are screen printed in opaque white ink, while a second screen of just the...
Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (French, 1626-1699 ), a painter, designer and engraver, created many prints like this work, Plate 10 from Set of Flowers in a Basket which is dated to 1680. Early flower prints were primarily used for botanical textbooks, but by the end of the seventeenth century, they were considered a higher artistic medium. Prints like...
The unstructured nature of this family register sampler, initialed “SS” and attributed to Sally Sacket (b. 1786), is typical of eighteenth-century examples. In contrast to the more organized genealogy samplers that appear after 1800, the text here is run together in continuous lines. Sally’s sampler is one of a group of three Westfield, Massachusetts, examples...
Table frontals were used on numerous types of Chinese tables: altar tables, dining tables, and magistrate’s desks. They covered the fronts, sides and legs of tables, and often coordinated with a set of matching chair covers. Such furnishings made furniture more flexible: the decoration could be adjusted for the season, the type of festivity, and...
Have you ever wondered where you could find a spotted, two-legged creature with the body of a lizard, the ears of a goat, the wings of a bird and the claws of a chicken? How about a monster with the head of a dolphin, ears of acanthus leaves, the body of a snake, and a tail...
Suzani, meaning “of needle” in Persian, are large-scale embroideries central to Central Asian domestic culture. Young girls learned to sew at an early age, often beginning to work on textiles intended for their own marriage dowries. Suzanis were considered the most important textiles in a dowry. Indicators of skill and family wealth, they were status...
