Luxury Cloth: Cushion Cover
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.This rectangular cushion cover features the same design of a continuous network of lozenges on both sides, though the pattern does not match up at the edges. This suggests that it was composed of two pieces of cloth rather than by folding a single cloth in half. Once the textile was woven, its pattern was enhanced with black pigment, evident along the perimeter of the primary interlacing design and in the finer details of the pattern with the tufts of nested lozenges. While it is likely this work entered Oxford’s collections in the seventeenth century, recent testing of the fibers has yielded results suggesting a possible fifteenth-century date of manufacture.
Artwork Details
- Title: Luxury Cloth: Cushion Cover
- Date: 16th–17th century, inventoried 1883
- Geography: Democratic Republic of the Congo; Republic of the Congo; Angola
- Culture: Kongo peoples; Kongo Kingdom
- Medium: Raffia, pigment
- Dimensions: 18 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (47 x 24 cm).
- Classification: Textiles-Woven
- Credit Line: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford,1886.1.254.1
- Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing