Cover for a Jain Manuscript (c. 1800): Art, History and Details

Cover for a Jain Manuscript (c. 1800) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

When closed, the horizontal stack of Jain manuscript pages is protected by firm covers on the top and bottom. A donor may commission a luxurious textile to place over or wrap the sacred text to honor it. Textiles with repeated floral plant patterns—these appear to be roses—were popularized at the imperial Mughal court during the mid-1600s, after which they spread throughout India.

Object facts

• Title: Cover for a Jain Manuscript
• Date: c. 1800
• Culture: Western India, Gujarat
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: Silk: satin weave; embroidery, polychrome silk, gold filé, flat metal strip
• Dimensions: Overall: 26.4 x 13.7 cm (10 3/8 x 5 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1925.494

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pandey, Vishwanath. The Orient: The World of Jainism : Jaina History, Art, Literature, Philosophy and Religion. Bombay: Pandey, 1976.
• Shah, Umakant Premanand. Treasures of Jaina Bhaṇḍāras. Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology, 1978.
• Crill, Rosemary. Indian Embroidery. London: V & A Publications, 1999.

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.