Sheet with lace atop a floral garland with drapery below 1775 - 1875

This anonymous sheet combines lace, floral garlands, and drapery, using printmaking techniques. Consider the function of such a design in its cultural moment. Before industrialization made such things cheap, lace was a luxury product, a signifier of wealth and status. Garlands and drapery likewise evoked aristocratic houses and courtly life. So we might ask, who was the intended audience for this design? What kind of social aspirations did it play upon? The design gestures toward elite culture, but the print medium suggests a middle-class market, one that sought to imitate or reproduce the habits of the upper classes. Such imitation was crucial to the construction of social hierarchy, and the historian can use sources such as trade records, pattern books, and household inventories to learn more about how such images functioned in their time. The meaning of art is always contingent on its social and institutional context.