Description:
Woman's square kashmir shawl with matching fringe, woven with a 3" wide, polychrome border on all four sides. The solid colored central portion, known as the field, consists of a blue twill weave woven with silk warps and wool wefts. These kinds of shawls originated in Kashmir, near present day Afghanistan, India and Pakistan; utilizing the fine underbelly hairs shed by indigenous goats at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains in the warmer months. Collected by women, the wool was woven by male weavers in these communities. England (Norwich and Paisley, Scotland) and France (Paris, Lyon, and Nimes) led the European efforts to create them in the West during the early 19th century. While original kashmir shawls were woven in a twill tapestry weave (espoline in French), the patterned portions of European copies tended to be woven in a labor-saving weaving method similar to modern brocades (au lance, French for thrown), where patterning wefts are carried across the entire woven width. Kashmir shawls are known for their inclusion of a border of stylized pine cones, known as botehs. These motifs were later called paisleys, after the are of Scotland that produced inexpensive copies during the mid-late 19th century. The fashion for Kashmir shawls in Europe and America coincided with women's adoption of slender, neoclassical gowns at the turn of the 19th century, providing a form of modesty and warmth to the often sheer gowns. The fashion for shawls lasted nearly 100 years, falling out of favor with the emergence of the bustle in the 1870s, when they were discarded to better display the shelf-like rear fullness of women's skirts. This shawl is an important illustration of the kinds of European shawls that were imported into the Connecticut River Valley and stocked by area merchants during the 1820s and 1830s. Merchants in Greenfield and Northampton (Massachusetts) placed newspaper advertisements at all times of the year describing shawls similar to this example, including angola (angora), cassimere (imitation Kashmir) and square shawls. A long kashmir shawl with a red field exists in the collection of Memorial Hall Museum, Deefield, Massachuetts, that was owned by Lucinda Montague (1787-1831) of nearby Sunderland, Massachusetts that is similar in date to Historic Deerfield's shawl.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2013.22 |
