Artwork story
About Panel with Biblical vignettes
The artist and artwork
An unknown British needleworker made Panel with Biblical vignettes in 1667 as a pictorial embroidery. Instead of the silk more usual for seventeenth-century pictures, most of its surface is worked in crewel wool, with silk and metal-thread highlights, glass beads, mica, and silk satin. Long-and-short, stem, split, chain, knot, cross, and couching stitches build the figures, animals, flowers, buildings, and water. The embroidered initials and date led The Met to regard both design and execution as probably amateur, preserving evidence of a maker whose name is lost.
The world around it
The panel belongs to Restoration England, seven years after Charles II returned to the throne following civil war and republican government. Biblical narrative and Stuart loyalty could overlap, while embroidery remained a domestic accomplishment and a form of picture-making. Printed pattern books helped amateur needleworkers assemble flowers, animals, and scriptural scenes, but this maker crowded them together with unusual freedom. The result reflects both the religious imagery of the period and a world renegotiating monarchy, memory, and political legitimacy.
A detail to notice
The crowded surface works like a picture puzzle. At lower left, Hagar and Ishmael leave Abraham's household; at right, an Egyptian princess finds the infant Moses. Above the mermaid's grotto, Rebecca offers Eliezer a drink from the urn embroidered “1667.” The crowned man beneath the central canopy is uncertain, but The Met proposes Solomon judging two women over a child. A butterfly below him may also turn the scene into a coded celebration of the restored Stuart monarchy, since Charles I had been compared with Solomon. Around these miniature dramas, scale runs cheerfully loose: enormous flowers, hunting dogs, rabbits, lions, waterbirds, fantastic fish, and a stately house share one continuous landscape. Two tiny faces peer through its mica windows.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is embroidered picture made in Canvas worked with wool, silk, and metal thread, glass beads, mica, silk satin; long-and-short, stem, split, chain, knots, cross, and couching stitches and held in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department.
Recorded dimensions include Overall: 20 1/8 x 27 in. (51.1 x 68.6 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Ducks, Men, Women, Roosters, and Dogs. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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