Brocade with Soaring Phoenixes among Clouds (1100s–1200s): Art, History and Details

Brocade with Soaring Phoenixes among Clouds (1100s–1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The gold-brocaded designs of Jin brocades, such as this example with graceful phoenixes soaring into clouds, are typically asymmetrical. Moreover, they have no frame or border, and appear to have been cut out of larger decorative images.

Object facts

• Title: Brocade with Soaring Phoenixes among Clouds
• Date: 1100s–1200s
• Culture: China, Jin dynasty (1115–1234)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk and gold thread; tabby, brocaded
• Dimensions: Overall: 56.2 x 62.2 cm (22 1/8 x 24 1/2 in.); Mounted: 69.5 x 74 cm (27 3/8 x 29 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1994.292

A detail from the museum

Textiles like this, which were probably exported from China to Iran, helped transmit the phoenix motif into Ilkhanid decorative arts.

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, 1997.
• Komaroff, Linda, and Stefano Carboni. The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2002.

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.