Length of woven silk 1720s Dutch or British This beautifully preserved example is a valuable and instructive addition to the Metropolitan Museum's collection of eighteenth-century fabrics, as it relates to several major trends in the textile arts. The small compartmentalized areas with geometric designs in the manner of lace fillings, as well as the stylized floral bouquets, relate this textile to the so-called lace patterned silks, many of which are attributable to France. The imaginative small interstitial motifs are a hybrid of floral, geometric, and fantastic forms and recall elements found in bizarre silks, a group of disputed origin in part thought to be of Italian manufacture. Other characteristics, however, link the silk to a group of textiles tentatively established by Natalie Rothstein as Dutch. The narrow loom width of approximately sixteen inches is substantially less than that found in many other contemporary European textiles. The scale of the pattern is also reduced, but