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, the scale and construction of this purse and its trimmings are typical of a so-called ‘sweet bag’, a container for sweet-smelling substances. This term 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. In CMA’s example, the handle and lining look to be later replacements. The embroidery is worked on an open plain weave linen fabric with silk in a range of colors and silver metal thread (thin metallic strips wrapped around a white silk core). In places, the inked design is visible on the linen. The stitches used for the purse’s background are unusual in that they lie horizontally rather than vertically. The rectangle of embroidered fabric was folded along the base and stitched together up the sides. Ten holes are pierced through the embroidered fabric near the top edge of the purse. Two drawstrings, terminating in ornate tassels, are threaded through the holes. The nine floral motifs-- carnation, borage, rose, columbine, honeysuckle, grapes, rose, pansy and thistle—set within coiling stems and foliage are typical of the period. Two embroidery stitches were used, tent stitch and Elizabethan ground stitch.

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: 11.5 x 12 cm (4 1/2 x 4 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1946.416

Collection credit

Gift of The Textile Arts Club

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.