Forehead Cloth (late 1500s): Art, History and Details

Forehead Cloth (late 1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Sumptuous interlacing scrolls bearing flora and fruit embroidered with gold, silver, and silk thread decorate this set composed of a coif (cap see 1934.206) and forehead cloth (seen here). Individual motifs representing England appear within the scrolls, such as the Tudor rose, carnation, honeysuckle, and acorn. Fashionable ladies wore coifs in the house as semiformal dress and in bed for receiving guests. The large loops along its lower edge were drawn together to keep it in place. Worn pointing backward, the forehead cloth functioned like a visor, supposedly preventing wrinkles and keeping off the sun and cold air.

Object facts

• Title: Forehead Cloth
• Date: late 1500s
• Culture: England, Elizabethan Period, late 16th century
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: Silk, gold and silver thread, sequins, padding, linen; embroidery
• Dimensions: Overall: 16.8 x 38.7 cm (6 5/8 x 15 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1934.231

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Underhill, Gertrude. "Old Embroideries in the Museum: Three English Embroideries." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 21, no. 8 (1934).
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.