Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 27. (Budapest, 2009)

Györgyi FAJCSÁK - Andrea FÜZES: Chinese Embroidered Screen from the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

but originally presumably covered the back of the fireplace screen. The fabric panel was mounted on to a walnut frame. The frame stands on four slightly curved legs. Three decorative fields were mounted between its two lower cross-laths. The round central element of each square field is fixed to the frame by a turned knob on each of the four sides. According to the earliest known description, the upper cross-lath of the frame was adorned by six mandarin buttons, of which five survive. Mandarin buttons were typical adornments on Chinese male attire.

9 Scholars had them on the top of their hat, and mandarins indicated their rank by buttons of various materials and colours, in metal settings. On the screen, the row of mandarin buttons along the top of the frame harmonise with woman's tunic on the panel. The screen must have been made in a workshop in Canton, South China. Its form, materials and system of decoration place it firmly among Chinese export furniture from the turn of the 19

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h and 20

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h centuries, and it was clearly worthy of the attention of a European traveller. Restoration The fabric mounted in the wooden frame consists of five pieces.

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0 In the centre of the blue silk base fabric is a fragment of a tunic of embroidered black silk with an appliqué on the neck opening and framed by a narrow braid and a floral border around the edge of the embroidery. The tunic was adjusted to fit the screen," so that two-thirds of its front part is missing. The single-piece base fabric of the tunic fragment is black untwisted silk in a leno weave, whose distinctive feature is a sieve-like open structure.

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2 It has a density of 38 warp and 28 weft threads per cm. The pattern is a delicate, finely-stitched composition of animals and plants in white, yellow, blue, green, red, purple and brown threads. The embroidery comprises flat-, split- and stem-stitched Z-twist silk. The hands, faces and hair of the figures, the adornments of their headdress and clothes, and their shoes, were embroidered with particularly delicate stem- and flatstitching in untwisted silk thread. The blue warps and black wefts of the narrow braid

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3 framing the bottom and two sides of the tunic fragment are untwisted silk thread. The density of the eight-thread, regular satin weave of the braid is 76 warps and 34 wefts per cm. Its decoration is an alternating pattern of stylised flowers and bulbs in various shapes, in natural colour, light blue and dark blue, embroidered with flatstitched untwisted silk. The braid was first folded over to a width of 2 mm on each long side, glued in place and then sewn with black silk thread to the edge of the tunic fragment. The border, made up of twelve parts made up with running stitch,

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4 is natural colour fabric with Z-twist silk warp and weft yarn. The eight-thread regular satin weave fabric has a density of 108 warps and 48 wefts per cm. The pattern was first drawn and then embroidered with untwisted silk thread in satin stitch, brick stitch, Chinese knotted stitch and stem stitch. The embroidery threads are mainly off-white and orange, but also green, blue and brown. Some pieces of the scholars' attire are outlined with metal thread. The metal thread is gilded paper ribbon wound in the Z direction on to untwisted red silk. The glinting adornment was attached by intermittent stitching with untwisted red silk thread to the edges of the embroidered sections to be outlined (fig. 9). The unembroidered neck opening is covered by a round appliqué,

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5 which was probably a piece of the border material. It 176