Wine bearers in landscape, from a robe (1525–50): Art, History and Details

Wine bearers in landscape, from a robe (1525–50) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Iran is renowned for representations of large human figures in luxury silks during the Safavid period. Symbolic images of beauty and love characterize this signature silk in which a wine bearer appears in a landscape with cypresses and blossoming prunus trees, a pond, and a rocky hill along with animals of royal hunts. Cypresses and long-neck bottles were metaphors for elegance and male beauty while cypresses entwined by blossoming trees, paired pheasants, youth, and wine impart themes of love. The asymmetrical composition contrasts vitality and order, which contributes to concealing the repeated design inherent in patterned silks.

Object facts

• Title: Wine bearers in landscape, from a robe
• Date: 1525–50
• Culture: Iran, Safavid period (1501–1722)
• Type: Textile
• Technique: Silk: lampas
• Dimensions: Overall: 85.1 x 38.1 cm (33 1/2 x 15 in.); Mounted: 91.4 x 45.7 cm (36 x 18 in.)
• Collection: T - Islamic
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1924.743

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• Milliken, William Mathewson, et al. “In Memoriam: Jeptha Homer Wade.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 13, no. 4, 1926, pp. 63–91.
• 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.