Brocade with Lotus Flowers (1200s–mid-1300s): Art, History and Details

Brocade with Lotus Flowers (1200s–mid-1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The tradition of brocade weaving in northern China continued after the Mongol conquest. However, the arrival of eastern Iranian craftsmen affected both the design and the structure of the brocades: patterns became symmetrical and paired warps replaced single warps. Both of these modifications can be observed in this example. At the same time, however, the Jin tradition of floating foundation wefts across the back sides of the brocaded areas continued. Brocades such as this may have been woven in Hongzhou (in Hebei province), where weavers from both western Asia and from the former Jin capital, Bianjing, are known to have worked together.

Object facts

• Title: Brocade with Lotus Flowers
• Date: 1200s–mid-1300s
• Culture: Northern China, Yuan dynasty (1271-1368)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: tabby, brocaded; gold thread
• Dimensions: Overall: 58.4 x 67 cm (23 x 26 3/8 in.); Mounted: 68.6 x 77.5 cm (27 x 30 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1994.293

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Watt, James C. Y., Anne E. Wardwell, and Morris Rossabi. When silk was gold: Central Asian and Chinese textiles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1997.
• Watt, James C. Y., and Maxwell K. Hearn. The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010.
• Pomper, Linda Rosenfeld. "New Perspectives on Kinrande." Arts of Asia. 44, no. 5 (2014): 73-82.

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.