Birds and Flowers

Each of these panels presents two pairs of birds in a landscape of rock and flowering trees, illustrating the intersection of painting and embroidery. The finely stitched creatures display a wide range of colors, from bright pink and orange to tan and black. Flowers and leaves are depicted with articulated veins and subtle shading. Inspired by auspicious painting traditions, the rocks appear in fanciful blue, green, and purple hues, outlined in dark thread. Since textiles are highly light sensitive, conservators examined this screen with ultraviolet light, causing the pink thread to glow orange. Together with mass spectrometry analysis, this fluorescence reveals the presence of an early synthetic dye developed in the 1880s, confirming the screen’s late nineteenth-century date.