Fragment with a Garden Scene
Not on view
This silk textile fragment depicts a scene of leisure in a lush outdoor garden. Two musicians, one with a tambourine and one with a zither, sit surrounded by oversized flowers and plants. Idealized scenes of figures in landscape settings were popularized by illustrations in Safavid poetic anthologies, and were emulated by textile designers. The black outlining of the figures and plants in this example creates a graphic, sinuous quality reminiscent of contemporaneous line drawing. The tambourine contains an inscription in black, which names the artist as 'Abdallah. Though now slightly faded, this textile originally would have gleamed with rich metallic threads.
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