Paste paper with red, purple, yellow, and green design
18th century
Medium
Relief print (wood or metal)
Dimensions
Sheet: 5 1/2 × 7 5/16 in. (14 × 18.5 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926
Accession Number
26.71.9(130a)
Art Historical Context
This vibrant 18th-century paste, featuring a lively design in red, purple, yellow, green, exemplifies the anonymous artistry of European decorative crafts. Created through relief printing—likely using carved wood or metal blocks—the small sheet (5 1/2 × 7 5/16 in.) captures, repeating patterns brushed with colored paste onto handmade paper. Paste papers like this were a hallmark of workshops in Germany, France, and beyond, where artisans produced affordable, eye-catching sheets for bookbinding, endpapers, and. The technique involved dipping stamps or rollers into pigmented paste, then pressin...
About the Artist
Anonymous
In the vast tapestry of art history, "Anonymous" stands not as a singular individual but as a collective designation for countless unidentified creators whose works have endured across millennia. These artists, spanning prehistoric cave painters to medieval illuminators and folk craftsmen, produced the foundational layers of human visual culture. Prior to the Renaissance, when individual fame emer...