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Lot Essay
The word palampore is a possible Anglicisation of palang-posh or bedcover, which describes the principal use of these export cloths, although other sources claim it to have derived from the town of Palanpur in Gujarat (Hobson-Jobson, 1903, p.662). Painted and printed cloths with a flowering tree or large-scale floral design were in demand both in Europe and in Indonesia, where they circulated in the eighteenth century and later.
The filler motifs of twirling birds of our palampore finds a direct comparable in an example at the Victoria and Albert Museum (no. IS. 155-1953) dated to circa 1700. A related bed canopy at Schloss Hof, near Vienna, originally the property of Prince Eugene of Savoy and then purchased by the Habsburg Marie Theresia combines oversized flowers and stylised rock motifs with birds and insects (Crill, 2015, cat. 131, pp.168-171).
Our example is unusual in that the central field is left entirely to the birds without the background of flowers or leafy branches. This layout gives the palampore an extraordinarily dynamic and somewhat realistic composition.
The filler motifs of twirling birds of our palampore finds a direct comparable in an example at the Victoria and Albert Museum (no. IS. 155-1953) dated to circa 1700. A related bed canopy at Schloss Hof, near Vienna, originally the property of Prince Eugene of Savoy and then purchased by the Habsburg Marie Theresia combines oversized flowers and stylised rock motifs with birds and insects (Crill, 2015, cat. 131, pp.168-171).
Our example is unusual in that the central field is left entirely to the birds without the background of flowers or leafy branches. This layout gives the palampore an extraordinarily dynamic and somewhat realistic composition.