Silk Panel with Dragon and Cloud Motif (c. 1700s-1800s): Art, History and Details

Silk Panel with Dragon and Cloud Motif (c. 1700s-1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This panel of silk produced in one of the imperial factories is the end part of a bolt of silk, some of which were shipped to Beijing as tax payments. The inscription woven into the lower body of the fabric reads Jiangnan Silk Factory under Superintendent Wen Feng(?). An additional signature by the weaver is woven into the left corner. Since the Southern Song dynasty in the 1100s, the production of silk for imperial use was increasingly concentrated in the Lower Yangzi Delta, also called Jiangnan. By the Ming and Qing dynasties the main official imperial workshops were situated in the region’s cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing.

Object facts

• Title: Silk Panel with Dragon and Cloud Motif
• Date: c. 1700s-1800s
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644-1911), Jiangnan Imperial Factory
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk and metal thread: Jacquard weave
• Dimensions: Overall: 373.4 x 71.1 cm (147 x 28 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1976.1087

Collection credit

Gift of C. L. Burton

Further reading listed by the museum

• Spee, Clarissa von. "From the SIlk Road to the Imperial Court: Chinese Textiles in the Cleveland Museum of Art." Arts of Asia 48, no. 3 (May-June 2018): 50-56.

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.