Family Gathering on New Year's Morning (late 1760s): Art, History and Details

Family Gathering on New Year's Morning (late 1760s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This European-style tapestry depicts a family gathering, in a woven Western picture frame, that presumably once furnished the Hall of Cultivating the Mind (Yangxin dian) in the Forbidden City. The tapestry employs Western perspective and shading combined with the traditional Chinese subject of a family gathering in a palace, including motifs expressing wishes for good fortune and for a peaceful reign. In 1766, six French tapestries had been presented to the Chinese court. The Qianlong emperor was so intrigued that he commissioned tapestries in the French style from Suzhou. Records mention an imperial order for tapestries in the Western style, such as this one, in 1769, 1770, and 1775.

Object facts

• Title: Family Gathering on New Year's Morning
• Date: late 1760s
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)
• Type: Tapestry
• Technique: Silk and wool: tapestry weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 257.8 x 377.8 cm (101 1/2 x 148 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1942.825

Collection credit

Bequest of John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• "A Chinese Tapestry." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 25, no. 136 (1914): 231–230.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of the Inaugural Exhibition June 6-September 20, 1916. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916.
• Marceau, Henri, Horace H. F. Jayne, Calvin S Hathaway, Nancy Andrews Reath, and Boies Penrose. “The Stotesbury Collection.” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum 28, no. 151 (1932): 19–31.

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.