Purse (early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Purse (early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

According to Elizabethan embroidery scholar Jacqui Carey, this purse and its trimmings are typical of a ‘sweet bag’, though it is missing its handle and its drawstring is damaged. The term ‘sweet bag’ was popularized in George Wingfield Digby’s 1963 publication on Elizabethan embroidery; Digby used the term to describe small English purses dating from the 1500s and 1600s. The body of the purse is not the usual embroidered linen. Instead, it is a form of tubular warp-wrapping, a larger version of the structure and design found on tassels typical of the period. The body of the purse is made from a spiraling weft wrapped with multiple warp threads. It is assumed that it was made over a cylindrical form that was removed when the work was complete. The motifs are created by shifting the colored threads. Black silk warp threads that have since disintegrated expose the spiraling weft.

Object facts

• Title: Purse
• Date: early 1600s
• Culture: England, early 17th century
• Type: Embroidery
• Technique: embroidery; silk and silver filé on linen ground
• Dimensions: Overall: 6.5 x 9.5 cm (2 9/16 x 3 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1944.283

Collection credit

Gift of The Textile Arts Club

Further reading listed by the museum

• Underhill, Gertrude. "Gifts of the Textile Arts Club." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 33, no. 3 (March 1946): 24-26.
• Wardwell, Anne E. Material Matters: Fifty Years of Gifts from the Textile Arts Club, 1934-1984 : [Exhibition] 21 November-30 December 1984, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Museum, 1984.

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.