Sylvia Houghteling, Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015-2016, Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
This lecture will reconstruct the surprising ways that cloth from India revolutionized British textile arts beginning with Elizabethan embroidery and reaching all the way to a set of tapestries commissioned for Kensington Palace and purchased by Elihu Yale. Drawing upon research in royal archives, village workshops, shipping inventories and country houses in India and Britain, the talk will illuminate the forgotten history of early Anglo-Indian conversations in cloth.
Maker: John Vanderbank
The Concert
ca. 1700
Wool and silk
340.4 x 525.8 cm (134 x 207 in.)
Gift of Edward S. Harkness, B.A. 1897
Yale University Art Gallery 1926.30
Maker: John Vanderbank
The Palanquin
1690–1710
Wool and silk
Overall: 336.551 x 320.041cm (132 1/2 x 126in.)
Gift of Edward S. Harkness, ‘97
Yale University Art Gallery, 1932.130