The Metropolitan Museum of Art possesses one of the finest collections of textiles in the world. Encyclopedic in scope, it includes examples from all of the world's civilizations and from almost every period in history. Among the 35,000 pieces (a number which does not reflect the holdings of The Costume Institute) are archaeological fragments, tapestries, carpets, quilts, ecclesiastical vestments, silks, embroideries, laces, velvets, and more, dating from 3000 B.C. to the present. Highlights include late Antique domestic textiles made in Egypt by Christians and pagans alike during the fourth to seventh centuries; silk tapestries and embroideries of the Yuan dynasty, a peak of refinement and complexity in Chinese textiles; a five-medallion "compartment carpet" crafted in Persia during the Safavid period in the early sixteenth century (see Islamic Art); and the opulent and rare seventeenth-century French embroidered wall panels in the Museum's Louis XIV bedchamber.
Previously dispersed among the various curatorial departments according to the cultures that produced them, most of the Museum's textile holdings are now gathered in the Antonio Ratti Textile Center—one of the largest, most technically advanced facilities for the study, storage, and conservation of textiles in any art museum. (See Educational Resources for more information.) While each curatorial department retains intellectual responsibility for its own textiles, the custom-designed center provides the controlled environmental conditions necessary for the long-term preservation of these fragile works of art, as well as study and research facilities for Museum staff and the general public, and a state-of-the-art conservation laboratory.
Fifty highlights of the Museum's textile collection are presented here, organized into cultural groupings based primarily on curatorial departments, with objects from different departments occasionally interspersed when those departments have cultural or geographical affinities. Within the cultural groupings, highlights are ordered chronologically. In addition to these fifty, some of the curatorial departments have included select textiles among their own fifty highlights; you may search the online collection for specific materials, types of textiles, and cultures.
More about the Department and Its Collection
Although the Metropolitan Museum made its first textile acquisition in 1879—and has been committed to building a comprehensive collection of textiles ever since—no centralized facility existed at the Museum for their storage, study, and conservation until 1995. In that year, the 25,000-square-foot Antonio Ratti Textile Center opened on the ground floor of the Museum. The center is made possible by a major grant from the Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Antonio Ratti Foundation) of Como, Italy. Additional support has been provided by the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, Toyota Motor Corporation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Whether created for insulation, comfort, privacy, or decoration, out of utilitarian or luxurious raw materials, textiles represent the iconographic and ornamental expressions of their respective civilizations, as well as the geographic and historical paths by which the techniques and motifs employed in their creation have traveled from one civilization to another. Their portability, in fact, has made them one of the most significant commodities in human history.
Fashioned from often delicate fibrous and synthetic substances, textiles are particularly vulnerable to air, light, dust, dirt, and repeated handling. The Ratti Center has allowed for uniform management of the Museum's textile collection, ensuring that this vast documentary and design resource will remain available to scholars far into the future. With a database containing images of the Museum's entire textile collection, study rooms for the examination of the textiles themselves, and a reference library for the historical, technical, and cultural study of textiles, the Ratti Center provides unprecedented access to the Metropolitan's extraordinary collection of textiles (see Educational Resources).
Objects from the Museum's textile collections are featured in galleries throughout the Museum. In addition, special exhibitions are occasionally devoted, entirely or in part, to textiles; recent standouts have included "The Unicorn Tapestries" (1998), "When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles" (1998), "Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era" (1997), "American Schoolgirl Needlework: 'When this you see, remember me'" (1996), and "Textiles of Late Antiquity" (1995).
Each of the Metropolitan's curatorial departments that collects textiles has strengths that bear noting. The Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art possesses a small but significant collection of wool, cotton, and silk textiles and fragments of felt cloth from archaeological excavations at Shahr-i Qumis (ancient Hecatompylos) in northeastern Iran. Most of these have simple geometric patterns, but another textile fragment in the department's collection, thought to come from Egypt, is woven with figural patterns in Iranian (Sasanian) style.
The Department of Egyptian Art's approximately seven hundred pieces encompass the range of Pharaonic-period (ca. 3000–30 B.C.) and Roman-period (30 B.C.–ca. A.D. 300) textile production and use in Egypt. Represented are linen sheets, towels, garments, kerchiefs, and bandages; early examples of dyed linens; linens with inked or worked classification markings; inscribed linens; and painted linens.
With approximately 1,500 late Antique textiles from Egypt—such as a woven medallion of vivid woolen yarns from the late third or early fourth century and a tunic with Dionysiac ornament from the fifth century—the Department of Islamic Art picks up the thread from the Department of Egyptian Art. The department's collection also contains approximately two thousand Islamic textiles, from early inscribed (tiraz) and printed examples to dye-patterned cottons, brocades, velvets, and embroideries from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courts of Safavid Persia, Ottoman Turkey, and Mughal India. In addition, the department owns some 450 Oriental carpets, the largest and most comprehensive group in the United States (see Islamic Art).
The collection of medieval textiles at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the finest in North America. The holdings range from the Carolingian period to the late Gothic, from all parts of Europe. Major categories of works include tapestries, among them several rare and important series; embroideries from Germany, Italy, and France, as well as the finest collection of opus anglicanum (English work) outside Europe; woven silks, particularly from Italy and Spain; and many important and rare vestments. The collection of medieval tapestries at The Cloisters, the Metropolitan's branch museum devoted to the art of medieval Europe, is unsurpassed in quality and number (see The Cloisters for additional examples).
European textiles from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century are overseen by the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Among its approximately 17,000 pieces are woven, embroidered, painted, and printed textiles; a number of carpets; the largest collection of European lace in the United States; and about three hundred tapestries, including rare examples from the Brussels, Paris, Beauvais, and Gobelins workshops. The collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century velvets is of rare distinction, as is that of eighteenth-century French silks. The holdings of European embroideries and ecclesiastical vestments are also exceptionally rich. In addition, The Robert Lehman Collection contains about two hundred textiles, dating mostly from the Italian and Northern Renaissance, including a large group of ecclesiastical vestments.
The textile collection of the Department of Arms and Armor consists of heraldic banners from Europe, the Middle East, and Japan, plus a small number of European and Japanese martial costumes and accessories dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.
About one thousand textiles—principally samplers and other needlework; quilts and coverlets; nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century printed textiles; handmade rugs; and fabric commemoratives printed or woven in honor of historic occasions—belong to the Department of American Decorative Arts. The department also has a significant collection of work by Candace Wheeler (1827–1923), America's first important female textile designer. The Wheeler collection encompasses printed, woven, and embroidered pieces.
The Department of Modern Art's collection is particularly rich in textiles from the early twentieth century, with fine examples of woven and printed French Art Nouveau pieces, Art Deco designs from the 1920s by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Paul Poiret, and manufactured prints of the 1930s and 1940s by Fortuny, Inc., and Bianchini Ferier. Post–World War II holdings include textiles designed and manufactured by Jack Lenor Larsen, Warner Fabrics of England, the Memphis group, and Gretchen Bellinger. The crafts movement is strongly represented by many fiber artists, including Claire Zeisler, Sheila Hicks, and Françoise Grossen. The department also holds important archives of textile-related material from the Wiener Werkstätte, the Bauhaus Textile Workshop, Anni Albers, and Dorothy Liebes.
Chinese and Japanese textiles predominate in the collection of the Department of Asian Art. Particularly well represented are court robes from China, among the most lavish and visually imposing of all of the textile art forms in Asia, and Noh costumes from Japan (see Asian Art). Also notable is the comprehensive collection of Chinese rank badges, worn by civil and military officers of the imperial court. Examples range from the early fifteenth century—roughly when they were first used—to the end of the imperial era at the beginning of the twentieth century. Important aspects of the Japanese collection include Buddhist vestments (kesa) and secular apparel of the Edo period (1615–1868).
Somewhat over half of the almost 1,600 textiles owned by Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are Peruvian and date from the late first millennium B.C.E. to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of South America. Generally representative of ancient Peruvian styles and techniques, the textiles include mantles, tunics, and wall hangings made of cotton and camelid (wool) fiber. Indonesian textiles from the nineteenth and twentieth century range from beaded ritual weavings and mats to embroidered ceremonial skirts. Other African, Oceanic, and North American textiles include woven and embroidered raffia cloths from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and wool wearing-blankets of the American Southwest.
