Description:
A piece of a drawloom-woven silk known as a tissue or lampas. The ground is a yellow, warp-faced satin featuring vertical stripes of ombre pink, pink, white (woven in a rep or ribbed weave) and light green. Floating/binding warp is yellow, another, white warp serves for the ground weave. Supplementary, weft-patterned floats (brocading wefts) were added by the drawloom's figure harness, creating small floral sprigs about 1 1/2" x 1 1/2". The brocaded effects use seven colors, inclufing white, pink, red, rust, two shades of purple, and green. The very linear effect of the design with small floral motifs is indicative of the decline of silk for fashionable dress beginning in the 1770s. Formerly large and naturalistic designs were replaced by smaller-scale ones that mimicked embroidered motifs, or painted and printed motifs seen on imported cottons from India. Patterned silks such as this example were some of the costly fabrics availabe for dress and furnishings in the 18th century. It could take many months to design, prepare the loom, and weave them. English and European centers of 18th-century silk weaving included Spitalfields (East London), Lyon (289 miles from Paris), and Amsterdam and Haarlem in Holland. There is evidence that these costly fabrics were imported and worn in New England, but in far fewer numbers.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+F.182 |
