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.

Fragments of yellow toiles

Although there are many plants that produce a yellow tint for dyeing, all the natural yellows are light-sensitive and fade quickly. As a result, until color-fast yellow dyes were created in the 19th century, very few textiles were dyed in shades of yellow and only a very few of those have survived.
When looking at old French toiles, it's easy to notice that the early yellows had a wide range of shades that are not at all the color we traditionally think of as yellow. Instead, the natural dyes created tints that ranged from gold to orangish-yellow to apricot-yellow to near-brown. Below are pictures of several fragments of early yellow toiles from the late-18th and early-19th century.

Fine feathered friends

Although France is famous for glorious Paris, most of the country is rural with a large proportion of the people engaged in agriculture and agriculture-related activities. The French are very much in tune with the weather and the rhythm of the seasons and take great joy from the flowers, birds and other creatures.

The18th and 19th century French textile designs reflected this love of nature in its many aspects. One favorite theme was songbirds or other small birds that might be found in the garden or in nearby trees.
The first two fabrics shown below are unusual in that they depict hummingbirds hovering between the flowers. This hummingbird is extinct in Europe and has been for centuries. This tiny bird is now only found in the Americas. In 2007, a 30,000 year-old fossil of a hummingbird was discovered in France.

The next group are all 19th century fabrics in an array of styles and colors. This group includes a monochromatic toile as well as a two-color toile plus a black background piece and a piece with a neutral beige background. The beige background creates a canvas for a colorful foreground motif of spring flowers and cheerful songbirds.

A very curious French toile

I bought this unusual antique French toile from a dealer in the south central region of France a few years ago. The piece was a large quilted panel that would have hung at the head of of a bed. I first was drawn to it because of the very rarely-seen rose and yellow polychrome print. This toile is from the Alsace region, mid-19th century, and was likely designed by George Zipelius.
As I looked at the scenic motifs, I was quite amazed to realize that the story depicted French soldiers raiding a farm and stealing the farmer's goods!
Below, the first two pictures show the overall pattern and motifs.  The bottom part of the first picture shows the brightness of the original colors. This bright part was near the bottom of the panel and had probably been protected from the sunlight, perhaps behind the bed.

The next four pictures are close-ups of the scenes that tell the story. The first scene shows a soldier taking wheat from the farmer's wife; the second shows a soldier wrangling a pig by grabbing its tail while his cohort helps him pull. The third scene shows one soldier enticing a chicken out of the coop while the other is preparing to whack it with a stick! 

The last scene is a little difficult to interpret, but it looks like the farmer and his wife are building a masonry wall for protection, while consoling their depressed daughter. The people who lived in mid-19th century France had suffered years of war and of military confiscations, but I find it curious that they would want to hang a reminder on their wall.

Color schemes in 19th C French textiles, part 5 (green)

While red was used extensively in textile color schemes as mentioned in a previous post, other perennial favorites for backgrounds of French furnishing fabrics included gray, maroon, greens or browns - colors that today might seem dull. 

In this post, we'll look at all shades of green and olive backgrounds. Dark greens were a not a frequently-used color during the 19th century, even though they were a favorite of Napoleon. They became more common during the Art Nouveau period, but still not an often-produced background color. The dark green background fabric above, with roosters in a stand-off, is circa 1870. The ever-popular indienne floral is rendered in neutral tones on a forest green background, immediately below, ca. 1880.

The next, below, is a stylized print from the Napoleon III era.  Printed to look like woven silk, the pattern includes wheat heads and strawberry leaves as well as floral motifs, ca. 1870

This large-scale Art Nouveau pattern has pink lotus flowers with scrolling leaves, ca. 1900.

The 1686 French government ban on printed textiles

(This post is from the french-treasures.com website, page 2 of Historical notes)
Imported floral cotton prints from India had become so popular in France by 1685 that the French silk-producing companies were suffering from a severe loss of business. Fearing permanent damage to the silk trade, the government, in 1686, instituted a ban on the production, importation and sale of all printed textiles. The ban was in force for almost 80 years until it was finally repealed in 1759.

Oddly-enough, this ban affected both imported cotton prints and the domestically-produced copies of the Indian prints. The thriving French domestic textile industry that had been producing cotton printed fabrics, indiennes, was shut down. This proved to be fateful because the hundreds of French workers that had been employed in the printed cotton trade began to emigrate and took their expertise with them. Within a couple of decades, the European textile-printing industry was dominated by companies in England, Holland and Switzerland instead of France.

In France, the ban on printed textiles only spurred the public desire for them. The ensuing craze for printed cottons resulted in secret printing factories hidden in basements or churches and dramatically increased the smuggling of the goods through ports and unguarded borders. Heavy fines were levied for infractions of the law to little avail. Women caught wearing a printed cotton outfit were disrobed and the dresses were burned on the spot! Any smuggled printed cottons that were confiscated by the government agents were either shredded or burned.

In 1740, the ban was loosened slightly and the government then allowed resist-dyed indigo fabrics to be produced and sold. Finally, in November 1759, the ban and all restrictions on the production and importation of printed cottons were lifted. Immediately, textile-printing factories opened across France. The public passion and demand for the printed cotton textiles did not diminish even after they were again legal. The French companies soon regained international prominence. From 1760 to the twentieth century, the French textile industry produced incomparably beautiful printed fabrics.

Toile de Jouy - monochromatic prints

Almost everyone is familiar with French toiles and in particular, the monochromatic prints - the toiles de Jouy - produced by the 18th century Jouy factory owned by the Oberkampf brothers.

Besides employing top artists and designers to create the patterns for their printed cottons, the company was at the forefront of inaugurating mechanical and technical advances in printing methods as well as research into the chemical processes used in dyeing fabrics. Prior to the 1770s, all Jouy fabrics were tediously printed by hand with engraved wooden blocks. Wood block printing limited the dimensions of a pattern and was very time-consuming.

In the early 1770s, the factory installed its first copperplate press. The engraved copper plates, much bigger than the wood blocks, allowed for large scale floral and scenic patterns. Engraving on metal plates also allowed for far greater detail and intricacy in the patterns than had been possible with the wood blocks. These beautifully designed and expertly engraved patterns were printed in one color and are the earliest prints that we now identify as the toiles de Jouy. Interestingly, in 1800, about 65% of their monochromatic prints were done in violet while the other third was done in red or blue. Tastes change!