Album of Textile Samples (700s): Art, History and Details

Album of Textile Samples (700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The album contains an important collection of early East Asian textiles. There are fifty-five fragments in the album representing forty-five different textiles. The fragments vary in size from the smallest, about an inch square, to the largest, which is fifteen inches square. With three exceptions, the pieces are of silk. The techniques represented include plain cloth and gauzes, either monochrome or with printed decoration, and damask-like weaves with a ground in plain cloth and a pattern in twill and one example with the ground in weft twill and the pattern in warp twill. The compound weaves include one example of a compound warp-face cloth, a technique that had all but died out after Han times, and a number of compound twills with a variety of elaborate decorative motifs, which are among the most important and interesting in the collection. There are one embroidery and one fragment of silk tapestry.

Object facts

• Title: Album of Textile Samples
• Date: 700s
• Culture: China, Tang dynasty (618–907) or Japan, Nara period (710–794)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 42.5 x 46 x 6 cm (16 3/4 x 18 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1954.70

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "An Album of Textiles from the Shōsōin and Hōryūji." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 42, no. 6 (1955): 124–127.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.