Loom, Weaver and Drawboy (textile fragment)
Original title
Unidentified weaver 作者不詳
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 96.14.40
- Credit
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1896
- Rights
Public domain: woven in Japan in the first half of the 19th century by an unrecorded weaver. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A small fragment of pale blue-grey silk woven with a repeating picture in brown and gold: tall wooden looms seen at an angle, a weaver seated at the front of each and a second figure perched high in the frame. The pattern breaks off at the edges where the cloth was cut.
- Image
- 1190 × 1600
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009102
coldlibrary.com/g/009102 - Credit line
- Unidentified weaver, Loom, Weaver and Drawboy (textile fragment), first half of the 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009102
A drawloom needed two people: the weaver at the front, and a drawboy sitting high in the frame who pulled the cords that lifted the warp threads for each row of the pattern, so the design lived in the loom’s harness of cords and in the drawboy’s attention. Jacquard’s mechanism did away with the drawboy by reading the pattern from a chain of punched cards. This scrap of Japanese figured silk pictures the kind of loom that wove such cloth.
