At the Textile Museum: ‘Adorning the Horse’
By • April 2, 2026 0 404
In February, one of our local institutions of higher learning hung up a bunch of horse blankets. And not just blankets — saddle covers, under-saddle cloths and other horsey garb.
They didn’t come out of a barn or a tack room. The five-dozen precious, patterned artifacts are (literally) the fabric of “Adorning the Horse: Equestrian Textiles for Power and Prestige.”
On view through June 20 at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, the one-of-a-kind show is the most breathtaking spring exhibition in the nation’s capital. I’m not pulling your fetlock.
Installation view of horse blankets from Turkey, Syria, the South Caucasus and Iran. Photo by Richard Selden.
In 2021, competitive rider and Iyengar yoga instructor Judy Brick Freedman, a former Textile Museum trustee, and her husband Allen, who retired in 2000 as chairman and CEO of specialty insurer Assurant (then called Fortis), gave 100 equestrian textiles to the Textile Museum. Philadelphia-area residents, the Freedmans previously lived in Manhattan and near Oneonta, New York, where they bred and trained Paso Fino horses.
Drawn mainly from that donated collection, assembled over three decades, “Adorning the Horse” is a showcase of Asian weaving techniques from the sixth to the 20th century, vibrantly illustrating the essential role of the horse in a range of cultures.
The timing is auspicious: 2026 is the Year of the Horse in the East Asian zodiac.
On the second floor are textiles from Iran and Central Asia, including seven tasseled horse blankets from Turkey, Syria, the South Caucasus and Iran mounted closely together, almost as if worn by neighboring steeds. Reached by a curving staircase (and the elevator), the third floor, which overlooks the second, displays pieces from China, Tibet and Japan.
An 18th-century under-saddle cloth from Xinjiang, China. Photo by Richard Selden.
Photographs and reproductions of works of art visually expand the label text; others loop in a slide show at the exhibition’s second-floor entrance.
Across the top of each label is a colored bar that corresponds to the primary function of the object it describes: A Talisman for Protection (yellow), Wishes for Good Fortune (burgundy), Family Prestige (blue) and Rider as Connoisseur (green). Here are four third-floor examples:
- Coded with a yellow “talisman” bar are six ornaments for a horse’s forehead and two for cruppers (tail straps) from the Tibetan plateau, dating to the early 20th century.
- Coded with a burgundy “good fortune” bar is a resist-dyed rump cover with brass bells from Meiji Japan (1868-1912). The label notes: “The narrow side panels depict rabbits and ocean waves … referring to an often reinterpreted story from the Kojiki — The White Rabbit of Inaba.” (The Kojiki is an eighth-century anthology.)
- Coded with a blue “prestige” bar is a Chinese bridle with a single rein and a lead rope, one of the few objects not from the Brick Freedman Collection. According to the donor, Belle Brent Ward Duchin (reads the label): “they were acquired in China by a forebear, an officer in the United States cavalry who accompanied former president Ulysses S. Grant on his world tour in 1879.”
- Coded with a green “connoisseur” bar is an early 17th-century silk-pile saddle cover with lotus and chrysanthemum decoration from Ningxia in north-central China, now an autonomous region for the Hui nationality, the members of which are Chinese-speaking Moslems.
One of the most eye-catching objects on the third floor (coded burgundy) is an 18th– or 19th-century saddle from Tibet or Mongolia, on loan from New York’s Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, which is no longer a public museum. The saddle’s face plates of gilt iron depict four-clawed dragons and its silk covers are lushly embroidered with lotus blossoms.
Two ornaments for a horse’s forehead from the Tibetan plateau, dating to the early 20th century. Photo by Richard Selden.
The second floor features a glorious selection of pieces from Iran, including (all coded green): a Qajar dynasty (1789-1925) saddle cover from southwestern Iran — perhaps “used during a falconry event in the Qajar court” — with a scene of a falcon attacking a duck and six female portraits, dating to the early 19th century; a Bakhtiari saddle cover in quilted and embroidered velvet, the slit for the pommel (the knob at the front of the saddle) decorated with “the Qajar period national emblem of the lion-and-sun (shir-o-khorshid)”; and a Kurdish saddle cover of 1870 from Sanandaj (Senneh) in western Iran.
“Many horse covers were commissioned by khans and state officials for their prize horses,” notes the label for the latter, which translates its inscription: “Worked in the city of Sanandaj on demand of the highness. Started in the month of Rajab and finished in the month of Rajab. The year 1287 A.H.” (A.H. stands for Anno Hegirae, the Hijrah being the 622 migration from Mecca to Medina.)
Among the objects connected with nomadic Central Asian tribes, ranging east from Iran, are (all coded blue): a horse blanket dated 1900 from the Qashqai, a confederation of five Turkic-speaking tribes associated with the Dareshuri breed, from Iran’s Fars province; a Yomut horse blanket, long enough to reach from neck to tail, from Turkmenistan, dating to the second half of the 19th century (per the label, the Yomut “bred highly prized equine breeds such as the Akhal-Teke and Yomut”); and a Lakai under-saddle cloth from Uzbekistan from the second half of the 19th century or the early 20th century.
Two other (green-coded) objects of note: also from Uzbekistan, a Kazakh man’s leather and silk robe, with side slits to accommodate mounting and dismounting; and a silk horse cover made in India between 1750 and 1858, displayed on a life-size horse mannequin (one of two). “The sun motif was a prominent emblem of the Mewar kingdom in Rajasthan,” reads the blanket’s label, “where it symbolized the royal family’s claim of descent from the Sun God, Surya.”
Developed by staff members (supported by students), fellows and volunteers, the “Adorning the Horse” exhibition and its catalog were underwritten by the Freedmans and by the Brick Freedman Endowment for Equestrian Textiles.
An International Equestrian Film Series has been programmed on Saturdays at 1 p.m. Upcoming screenings: “Home on the Steppe: Cowboys in Kazakhstan,” on April 18; and the Iranian documentary “Atlan,” about a Turkman horse trainer, on May 9. An “Adorning the Horse” playlist is downloadable via a QR code.
The institution’s two-museums-in-one name signifies its dual nature. Founded in 1925 in George Hewitt Myers’s Q Street mansion, the Textile Museum relocated to the Foggy Bottom campus in 2015. It shares a building designed by Hartman-Cox Architects — linked to Woodhull House, an 1855 former residence — with the George Washington University Museum, which exhibits materials from the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, donated to the university in 2011.
Adorning the Horse
Through June 20
The GWU Museum and the Textile Museum
701 21st St. NW
Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
