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Object Timeline
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Textile (France)
This is a Textile. It is dated ca. 1780 and we acquired it in 1931. Its medium is silk and its technique is printed by engraved plate and hand-colored with watercolor and metallic pigments on plain weave. It is a part of the Textiles department.
The Astronomer
Illustrated accounts of travels to the Far East served as guides for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists in Europe, who used these illustrations to create fanciful and imaginative chinoiserie scenes. This textile’s design is in the style of the prolific French chinoiserie artist Jean-Baptiste Pillement. Pillement’s astronomers were inspired by the travel accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries, as well as by earlier eighteenth-century chinoiserie designs, such as The Astronomers tapestry from the series The Story of the Emperor of China (ca. 1697-1705). Though similar to known Pillement designs, such as his Etudes de differentes figures Chinoises (1758), this astronomer design lacks the fanciful, whimsical hand typical of Pillement’s work. The textile is comparable to a set of silk wall coverings in the collection of the Musées des Tissus et des Arts Dècoratif, which have the same image but are significantly larger than Cooper-Hewitt’s example. The textile’s small scale as well as its hastily printed design, which has several noticeable gaps, suggests that it was a print trial.
This object was featured in our Object of the Week series in a post titled The Astronomer.
This object was
donated by
Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper Hewitt.
It is credited Gift of Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt.
- Telescope, Transit of Venus
- brass, iron, glass.
- Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, 2006.0182.02-03.
- 14.2012.72
- Teapot with Chinoiserie Vignettes Teapot
- hard paste porcelain, vitreous enamel, gold.
- Bequest of Erskine Hewitt.
- 1938-57-651-a,b
Its dimensions are
H x W: 53 x 69.5 cm (20 7/8 x 27 3/8 in.)
Cite this object as
Textile (France); silk; H x W: 53 x 69.5 cm (20 7/8 x 27 3/8 in.); Gift of Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt; 1931-48-100
