A LARGE OTTOMAN EMBROIDERED FLORAL PANEL Ottoman Turkey, 18th century The joined panel of unbleached linen finely worked in diagonal stitch with a design of two overlapping and intertwined trelisses, the deep pink-red silk with clusters of stylised flowers, and the dark green silk with serrated saz leaves, the border of alternating pink floral and green lobed motifs maintaining the theme, laid on off-white ground, mounted on a stretcher, 237cm x 106.5cm, 240cm x 110cm including mount. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ottoman embroiderers started making large embroidered panels imitating 16th-century luxury silk patterns, some of these presumably for quilt facings. To boost the resemblance, embroiderers even used the same six colours of silk thread: crimson or red, blue, green, brown / black, yellow and white. The patterns were drawn in ink on multiple widths of loosely attached plain linen cloth by professional draftsmen and the embroiderers followed with running stitches and reassembled them (Louise W. Mackie, Symbols of Power, Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands 7th - 21st century, New Haven, 2015, p. 330).