Orphrey Band: The Tree of Jesse (c. 1350): Art, History and Details

Orphrey Band: The Tree of Jesse (c. 1350) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

From the 1100s to the 1300s in London, both men and women worked as professional embroiderers. Here, the Tree of Jesse, a favorite medieval theme illustrating the ancestry of Christ, appears as a grapevine with three ancestors—Achim, Ezechias, and Eliud—seated on tendrils. Painters often provided embroiderers with designs, revealing a close relationship between the professions.

Object facts

• Title: Orphrey Band: The Tree of Jesse
• Date: c. 1350
• Culture: England
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: Silk, gold and silver thread, linen; embroidery: split and couching stitches
• Dimensions: Overall: 85.7 x 18.1 cm (33 3/4 x 7 1/8 in.); Mounted: 109.2 x 28.6 cm (43 x 11 1/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Ecclesiastical
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1949.503

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Arts of the Middle Ages; A Loan Exhibition, February 17 to March 24, 1940. Boston, Mass: Museum of Fine Arts, 1940.
• Shepherd, Dorothy G. "An English Embroidery." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art. 37, no. 4 (1950):
• Riefstahl, Elizabeth. "An Embroidered Tree of Jesse." Brooklyn Museum Bulletin 11, no. 4 (1950): 4-13. Accessed April 24, 2020.

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.