Description:
Set of bed furnishings including valances, backdrop, tester, bedspread, and side curtains made of copperplate-printed blue and white fustian (woven with a linen warp and cotton weft, as British law prohibited the production of all-cotton cloth at the time it was printed) with a pastoral scene of a girl spinning with a drop spindle and a young man playing a flute amid classical ruins, which has the manufacture's mark, "R. Jones 1761." The technique of colorfast copperplate printing, invented in 1752 by Francis Nixon of Drumcondra, Ireland, encouraged new possibilities in the development of printed textiles design, allowing a fineness of detail and delicacy of drawing which had not been achieved in earlier woodblock-printed textiles. It also allowed much larger pattern repeats, which made it particularly suitable for bed hangings. Robert Jones's factory at Old Ford, Middlesex (now London), where this fabric was printed in 1761, was one of the leading textile printing works in England at that time. The importance of the factory can be assessed by the advertisements for the sale of its premises and equipment in 1780. These show that the printworks occupied 67 acres and the assets included "200 copper plates and 2,000 blocks and prints, most of which are esteemed patterns calculated for a general course of foreign trade." See HD F.131 for similar reproduction bed hangings made for Allen House.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+F.132 |
