Embroidery with Birds (700s-800s): Art, History and Details

Embroidery with Birds (700s-800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

These engaging little birds are embroidered in a naturalistic style that developed during the 8th and 9th centuries. All but one are oriented away from the central pair that flanks a tulip growing from a hill. Contrasting with the spontaneity of the birds is the structured pattern of the silk ground—rosettes within a lozenge grid. Such contrasts frequently occur among embroideries of the Tang dynasty. Also characteristic of embroideries from that period is the use of discrete areas of color with no attempts at shading. The form of the birds, the hill, and the flower are based on Persian models. The introduction of foreign motifs into the decorative arts of Central Asia and China was one of the most important results of active trading in precious objects along the Silk Road.

Object facts

• Title: Embroidery with Birds
• Date: 700s-800s
• Culture: China, Tang dynasty (618-906)
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: embroidery, silk thread on silk ground
• Dimensions: Overall: 157.5 x 25.7 cm (62 x 10 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1994.96

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings 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. 1997.
• "A Meeting of Traditions." HALI 95 (November 1997): 102-104
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.

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.