Velvet panel with four youths smelling flowers (1625–50): Art, History and Details

Velvet panel with four youths smelling flowers (1625–50) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A new style depicting single figures with limited modeling and European artistic influence was spearheaded by the Iranian painter Riza ‘Abbasi and adopted by textile designers in sumptuous brocaded velvets. Even with faded colors, this grand length retains ten colors of velvet pile, a feat that Iranian velvet weavers achieved by skillfully replacing colored pile warp during weaving, and thereby creating the most colorful velvets in the world. Elegant youths dominate the simplified outdoor setting here with diminutive cypresses and silver ponds on a ground originally covered with gold thread. Fashionably dressed young men wear wide-brimmed hats, silver robes, stole-like scarves, and knotted sashes that are symbols of status and rank.

Object facts

• Title: Velvet panel with four youths smelling flowers
• Date: 1625–50
• Culture: Iran, Isfahan or Yazd, Safavid period (1501-1722)
• Type: Velvet
• Technique: Silk: velvet, brocaded, and pile-warp substitution; gilt- and silver-metal thread
• Dimensions: Overall: 157.5 x 72.7 cm (62 x 28 5/8 in.); Mounted: 167.6 x 83.2 cm (66 x 32 3/4 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1932.42

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Waley, Arthur. The Year Book of Oriental Art and Culture. London: E. Benn, Limited, 1925.
• Underhill, Gertrude. “A Shah Abbas Velvet of the Early Seventeenth Century.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 19, no. 4, 1932, pp. 51–54.
• Reath, Nancy Andrews, and Eleanor B. Sachs. Persian Textiles and Their Technique from the Sixth to the Eighteenth Centuries, Including a System for General Textile Classification. New Haven: Pub. for Pennsylvania Museum of Art by Yale University Press, 1937.

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.