Canopy with Dragon among Flowers (1100s/1400s): Art, History and Details

Canopy with Dragon among Flowers (1100s/1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The tapestry sewn into the center of this canopy depicts dragons among flowers, a classic design in Chinese art. Its weavers paid attention to fine details, such as the color gradation of the dragon’s scales, or subtle color changes in the flower petals and leaves. The selection of colored silk threads is soft in tone but rich in variety. All these stylistic characteristics indicate that this tapestry was woven in an imperial Southern Song workshop in the capital of Hangzhou, a center of textile production in the Jiangnan region.

Object facts

• Title: Canopy with Dragon among Flowers
• Date: 1100s/1400s
• Culture: China, Center: Southern Song dynasty (1127-1270) Border: Ming dynasty (1368-1644)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Center: silk, gold, tapestry weave (kesi). Border: silk, gold, lampas weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 87 x 84.5 cm (34 1/4 x 33 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1995.1

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shaffer, Daniel. "Marketplace: On the Crest of a Wave." HALI; the international journal of Oriental carpets and textiles, 43 (February 1989), p. 108.
• 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.
• Wardwell, Anne and James C. Watt. "A Meeting of Traditions." HALI; the international journal of Oriental carpets and textiles, 95 (November 1997), pp. 102–104.

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.