Printed French Fabrics - Toiles de Jouy - book

An excellent book to add to your library was published by Rizzoli, New York in 1989 and is entitled Printed French Fabrics - Toiles de Jouy by Josette Brédif.  This 184 page book is a comprehensive history of the Oberkampf factory at Jouy-en-Josas, France and includes 196 illustrations. Although this book is out-of-print, it can usually be located to buy on used book websites.
When thinking of "toiles" or "toile de Jouy," the first image that comes to mind is a cotton fabric that is printed with pastoral scenes in blue or red on a white ground. In fact, the Jouy factory produced a wide range of textiles, including hundreds of beautiful floral prints for clothing, scarves and shawls, elegant upholstery fabrics that imitated woven silk motifs, floral furnishing fabrics as well as their famous printed scenic cottons.

This well-researched and well-written book includes a history of printed textiles in France as part of its focus on the artistic and technological advances in textile manufacture made by the Oberkampf company. My favorite chapter is "The Factory in Operation" which describes the 19th-century textiles printing methods in detail with pictures of the many labor-intensive steps in the process.

French Textiles - From 1760 to the Present - book review

I've had several email from readers asking which books I would recommend for learning about textiles or as good reference and research books.
There is a list on my website, but I'll use this opportunity to show some of those books in more detail. If you'd like to see the list, it can be found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.french-treasures.com/history1.htm

One of the best general books on French textiles is French Textiles - From 1760 to the Present  by Mary Schoeser and Kathleen Dejardin, published by Lawrence King in 1991. This book is currently out-of-print, but copies can be found on used book websites.

French Textiles - From 1760 to the Present, as the title indicates, focuses on the two hundred years since 1760, a year after France lifted the embargo on printed textiles. The embargo had been ordered a century earlier by the king in order to protect French silk producers from competition from imported chintz and other printed cottons from India and the Far East.
French Textiles gives a chronological history of the French textile industry, organized by blocks of time as indicated in some of the chapter titles:  "Enlightenment (1760-1790)"; "Upheaval (1790-1830)"; "Industrialization (1830-1870.)"
Each chapter has many pictures to illustrate the text, including images of textiles from the epoch as well as pictures of household interiors that show how the textiles were used. French Textiles - From 1760 to the Present is an excellent book, both as a general survey as well as a solid reference.
The first picture below, from page 41, shows a typical late-18th century bed that used several different toile patterns on one bed. The second below is the book open to pages 52-53 and shows typical 18th century floral prints.

French fabrics and the indienne flower

French textile designers took inspiration from the colorful printed textiles that were imported from India by traders and overseas trading companies in the 17th century. The Indian motifs and colors were re-interpreted and modified in order to more easily sell to French households. These French-designed and French-produced textiles in the East Indian style were called indiennes.
Some of the more popular motifs were of large-headed fantasy flowers and were often incorporated into wide textile borders as well as in wallpaper friezes and borders.
Here are several large indienne floral prints from three different 19th century wide cotton border prints from the Alsace region of France. These borders measured about 10-12" wide and the oversize flowers were almost the full width.

As can be seen by the printed cottons below, the same sort of indienne floral motifs were used in curtain and drapery fabrics as well, but in a much smaller scale. The third below incorporates the popular Indian tree-of-life motif in a slightly modified version.

Autumn leaves

"The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold...."
lyrics by Johnny Mercer

The song "Autumn Leaves" was originally written in French by Jaques Prévert and was entitled "Les feuilles mortes" (The dead leaves.) It was later translated by Johnny Mercer.
Pictured below are three 19th century French cotton prints with the theme of autumn leaves and leaves starting to turn brown.



French tea towels - Les torchons

Tea towels are a standard in kitchens around the world, but the French tea towel, le torchon, has its own character. Traditionally made of a flat-weave linen or métis (linen-cotton weave), the classic style of tea towel is white or off-white with red stripes. The stripe are sometimes along each end or can be along each of the four sides.



On vintage tea towels, there is usually a small embroidered red initial or initials. These were added so the owner could identify her own tea towels when they was sent to the blanchisserie (laundry) for washing. (The same mark was added to sheets and pillow cases and white shirts.) Wealthier homemakers had their tea towels embroidered with fancier red monograms.

The fastidious French kitchen required tea towels to be in sets of four, each with a loop for hanging. The four towels were to be used for separate tasks - hands, glassware, dishes and cutlery. Kitchen towel racks came with four hooks, each hook labeled for the corresponding towel.

The toweling was manufactured in the exact width needed for the towels with cutting lines designated in the weave. When new, the toweling always had a glazed finish to protect the fibers. Here is a piece of unused yardage of vintage French linen toweling for the kitchen:

More French tickings from Alsace

French antique tickings from the Alsace region of France are coveted for their deep red tones and seemingly endless variations in the colors, shadings and widths of the stripes. Although most collectors are familiar with the saturated red tickings, the softer tones are less well-known.
In addition to the red tickings, the region produced pastel and pale shades as well as tickings that were predominately blue. The paler colors included various shades of rose, beige, faded red, yellow, olive, blue and candy pink. The tickings in these colors were usually used for summer beddings and for bedding for children.
Below, the first five pictures are five Alsace tickings in pale tones that are predominately pink and rose. The last two pictures on the page show tickings that were produced in a classic French blue paired with yellow.

 

Art Deco orange

In the fall of 1905, all Paris was talking about the new style of paintings exhibited at the Salon d'automne. A group of artists led by Henri Matisse, who came to be known as Fauvists, used bright and clear colors in their revolutionary work. Similar movements took hold in the art world in Germany and Austria.
French textile designers from that era included Sonia Delauney and Raul Dufy whose hand-printed fabrics were ordered by couturiers such as the innovative Poiret. A style was born.
Textiles were designed with geomtric and highly stylized motifs and then printed in bold, bright colors. World War I put a hold on the movement, but at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes the streamlined look and the new colors and materials created a worldwide.

One of the favorite colors in the era was orange, which was often paired with blue to create a vibrant look. Below are several examples of the use of orange in Art Deco fabrics from the 1920s-1930s.



Chocolate, cocoa and cacao

Reading a news story today about a commodities trader who is busy cornering the world market on cacao, I decided to recount a brief history of chocolate from an article in the April 2007 issue of Art et Décoration.

Cacao is a New World plant. When the Spanish explorers first landed in Mexico in 1519, they were welcomed by Montezuma and the Aztecs as if they were gods and were served the 'drink of the gods' - hot chocolate made with water and spiked with plenty of hot pepper.
A decade later, in 1528, chocolate was finally imported into Spain, but by then, the drink had been modified to suit Spanish tastes. Hot pepper was no longer in the mixture; instead the drink was flavored with cane sugar and vanilla.
The taste for drinking chocolate spread across Europe as travelers and visitors to Spain took the cacao bean with them. In Italy, the Jesuits cornered the cocoa market and created new recipes for drinking hot chocolate, often flavoring the drink with lemon or jasmine.
There was one problem though. Chocolate was marketed as invigorating and an aphrodisiac, so was frowned upon by the Church elders. This ethical question was overcome as the hot drink gained in popularity across Europe.
When Anne of Austria (born and raised in Spain) married France's King Louis XIII, she brought the chocolate craze to the French court. The enjoyment of drinking hot chocolate received an additional boost in 1661 when the French Académie de médicine listed the curative values of chocolate. The first French chocolate shop opened in Bayonne in 1687.
By 1866, almost 200 years later, chocolate was officially listed as part of French pharmacological treatment. Luckily for us, modern medicine has also 'discovered' that dark chocolate has positive health benefits.
Below is a scanned image from the Art et Décoration article.

French Arts and Crafts embroideries

As the Arts and Crafts movement gained in popularity at the end of the 19th century, the 'natural' look became a theme in home decor and found expression in many decorative hand-made objects. The crafts were usually done by women and included pottery, needlework, painting and more. French homemakers, who were skilled at needlework favored pieces made of natural linen which were then hand-embroidered. The charming motifs were also 'natural', i.e. plants, flowers and fruits. These linen pieces took many forms, including bags, knitting bags, letter and lingerie holders, pillows, valances, umbrella covers - the list was only limited by the imagination of the creator. Many women subscribed to stitchery magazines and used the ideas and patterns offered on the pages.
The first picture below shows a bouquet of mistletoe. The mistletoe was embroidered on a hand-made linen valance that would have been hung across the top of a doorway.

The second is a lined 'envelope' for storing silk stockings or fine lingerie. The motif, oddly enough, is also mistletoe, but this piece was bought in a different region of France several months after the valance above.

The linen holder hung from the loop at the top. Its purpose was to held letters or correspondence which would have been slid in from the side.

The last photo shows a small drawstrong handbag. Be sure to note the fancy scalloped top edge and the variegated drawstring that matches the colors of the embroidered motif.

Grapes and wine from the vine

Cultivation of the grape vine and the production of grapes into wine has a history that stretches back almost 6000 years. When the Romans invaded Gaul (present day France) and founded the city of Narbonne in 118 B.C., wine making was already well-established. Every region of France has hundreds of acres of vineyards except for northern Normandy (Normandy specializes in apple orchards and Calvados.)
Due to the importance of the grape in French agriculture and commerce, it's not surprising that it was used as a motif in printed textiles.  The first swatch pictured below is a very early (ca. 1820) Alsace print with a grape motif and an unusual color scheme.

The next four examples are all mid- to late- 19th century. Note the similarity between the motif of the red and white toile and the red and gray print.

 

And the real thing in mid-summer, when the tender, young grapes are green and still growing.