Description:
Pieced, monochromatic (red) copperplate-printed fragment depicting scenes from the play Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades, by David Garrick (1717-1779), and English playright, actor and theater manager. Lethe was a dramatic satire with mythological overtones, first produced in London in 1740. According to Florence Montgomery, this play was popular with American audiences, which may account in part for surviving examples in many collections on this side of the Atlantic. This kind of textile is often referred to today as a toile, the French word for a basic, serviceable cloth, and often connotes a monochromatic printed textile made of either plain weave cotton or else linen (warp) and cotton (weft). Although extensively pieced to create an entire repeat, this example has a single blue thread in some of the selvages to suggest it was produced in England between 1774 and 1811, when English law required all domestic manufacturers of printed cottons to include such a thread in the selvages to identify them as English manufacture, and thus legal (at this time imported printed cottons were illegal). If discovered, manufacturers found to possess printed textiles without such markings were fined and the goods in question were confiscated. The donor ontained this textile from a yard sale in Manchester, Vermont, in the early 1960s, and could have been used in America at the end of the 18th century
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+E2012.3.1 |
