Garment Hook (Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–221 B.C.)): Artwork and History

Garment Hook (Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–221 B.C.)) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as China.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

The buttonlike knob on the back of this small garment hook served to fasten a belt or robe. A dragon of jade curls sinuously within its bronze mount—a composite creature combining a bull's head and a serpentine body terminating in a fishlike tail curled over one horn. The dragon's finely incised curls are echoed in a complex pattern of gold and silver embellishing the mount. Thin strands of these malleable metals, applied individually or compacted together into thicker ribbons, were pressed into grooves in the bronze, then ground flush with the surface and polished to a high luster. This combination of descriptive and abstract patterns—facial features, scales, volutes, and spirals—is a masterwork of metallic inlay. The jade dragon is datable about three hundred years earlier than the inlaid bronze garment hook in which it was carefully set. The exquisite "recycling" of ancient jades demonstrates their value to those who inherited or discovered such pieces and then custom-designed new contexts for their use.

Object facts

• Title: Garment Hook
• Date: Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–221 B.C.)
• Artist attribution: China
• Place of origin: China
• Medium: Bronze inlaid with gold and silver and inset with jade
• Dimensions: 8.3 × 8.3 × 2 cm (3 1/4 × 3 1/4 × 13/16 in.)
• Type: Metalwork
• Department: Arts of Asia
• Reference number: 1930.703

Collection credit

Lucy Maud Buckingham Collection

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.