French 19th C textiles in shades of very dark green

Winter and summer in homes of the 19th century French bourgeoisie usually called for different textiles to be used in the decor - pale in the summer with darker and heavier weight fabrics used in the winter.

This piece, from the Napoleon III era, has a very dark greeny-black background with red and rose flowers as the foreground motif.

In this 19th century heavy-weight cotton, the background is again very dark, but this time a dark, dark olive green.  The foreground motif of roses climbing a trellis is done in an olive-khaki shade. The roses are rendered in a cherry red.

This Art Nouveau piece looks more like a spring fabric with the pale clematis and lilies of the valley.  The dark forest green background provides a contrast to the pale floral foreground.  This design would have been a fabric that could have easily been used year round, which became the more popular way to decorate a French home by the dawn of the 20th century.

Shades of green for spring in French homes of the 18th and 19th centuries

During the 18th and 19th centuries, rooms in the grand homes and those of the bourgeoisie were often decorated according to the season. Winter furnishings were in darker colors and sometimes in heavier fabrics. There were often more drapes and portières to hang in doorways and hallways to shut out the cold and the drapes for windows were often lined. Quilts and coverlets were part of the bedroom ensemble. Some quilts had two "faces" - one darker for winter and one lighter for summer. During the spring, the entire decor of a home was changed to lighter, paler and airier fabrics and motifs. For springtime fabrics, pistachio, spring green and pale greens were popular during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is a piece of woven silk created for a chair seat, done in bright spring green, mid-19th century. Note the use of symbols - the shell (symbol of the sacred path, but also used as a welcome sign for pilgrims in Medieval times) and the acanthus leaf (symbol of enduring life.)

Reddish-orange poppies and white grasses are the motif in this Art Nouveau fabric with a pale leaf-green background.

This 19th century French printed cotton features scattered flowers and leaves. The pale muted green background is a lovely canvas for the brightly-colored flowers. 

This pretty 1920s fabric, with a pale yellow-green background, was inspired by 18th century patterns.

Zipelius design in two colorways

The painter, Georges Zipelius, designed some of the most original and beautiful textiles in France during the 19th century.  His work was in great demand and his designs were commissioned by many different companies who produced textiles and wallpapers.
Some of Zipelius favorite printed color combinations were deep violet partnered with a greeny-yellow as well as shades of rose over-printed with bright yellow.
Below are two colorways, rose and violet, of Zipelius' bird-of-paradise pattern:

 

Martine Roch - A French artist and her unusual friends

In the 21st century, digital art has become another medium used by some artists to express themselves. Galleries and museums have been displaying the best examples of digital art in their contemporary art collections.
Not surprisingly, French artists are still setting a standard of excellence in all aspects of artistic pursuits, including digital art.  Martine Roch is a French artist from Dijon who creates a fantastic world of delightful animal friends.
Take a look at the pictures below.
To visit Martine Roch's website, click HERE.
If you'd like to have a bag or a pillow or a coffee mug with one of Martine's animal friends printed on it, please click HERE to visit Martine Roch page at Society 6.  I've "adopted" two of her animal friends for myself already - in the form of canvas shopping totes!
And click HERE to visit Martine Roch at Fine Art America to buy prints and greeting cards of her animal characters.
Below are three of her delightful characters:

Lizzie and her Cat

The Wise Man

The Little Chatterbox

French Art Deco lady

 

This Art Deco painting was the first thing I bought for myself in France and it still hangs on my living room wall.  I found it in an antique center in Bordeaux. The matte was water damaged, but I bought it anyway.  The local framer was able to match the matte color. He replaced the matte, but preserved the original frame and glass.

Gray backgrounds in French antique printed fabrics

The pictures below illustrate some of the gray tones that were used by French textile manufacturers during the 19th century and the early 20th century. The shades of gray included blue-gray, green-gray, charcoal and more. Gray was a popular color since it didn't show the soot from the fireplaces as did lighter colors. The first and third below are fabrics from 1870-1880 while the other three are Art Nouveau fabrics.

More colors of Provence

As mentioned in an earlier post entitled, "Color schemes in 19th C French textiles, part 9," red and gold were favorite colors in sunny Provence.  (To see that earlier post: http://french-treasures.blogspot.com/2011/03/color-schemes-in-19-c-french-fabrics.html)

Another favored color scheme from that era that we don't see very often nowadays is shades of turquoise or aqua with shades of red. Some interesting variations on this color scheme are shown below, starting with a lovely early-19th century imported fabric from India using red and aqua as the main color scheme:

Napoleon and the color blue

Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the first to promote "buy local."
During the 18th century, in the years before the revolution, most wealthy people imported their textiles and luxury goods despite strict laws against importing many types of textiles. The French textile industry languished and so did all the associated businesses like the dyers, the farmers who produced the raw materials, the weavers and the shopkeepers.
During the Middle Ages, the region around Toulouse had produced woad - a natural blue dye that is similar to indigo.  By the time Napoleon came to power, imported indigo was the preferred blue dye used in France. As a result, the French producers of woad were suffering and the entire Toulouse region was economically weak.
Napoleon chose the color blue for the French military uniforms in order to revive the production of woad. He decreed that the cloth for the military uniforms be produced in France with French wool, dyed blue with French woad and woven by French textile mills.  The region that produced woad thrived again under the Republic.

French antique bed sheets

Starting in the 1600s, the central government controlled the textile industry in France. Government agents decided who could produce textiles and what they could produce.
Bed sheets were manufactured in many regions and in varying styles. The most common bed sheet was woven on narrow looms, so in order to make a sheet that was wide enough to cover a two-person bed, these sheets have a hand-stitched center seam that joined two fabric widths.
Many families took their bedding to the local blanchisserie to be laundered.  In order to avoid mix-ups or loss, each person embroidered an identifying mark or initials on the sheets.  Many people simply embroidered tiny red letters or numbers on the hem, but others took the time to embroider monograms.
This 19th century sheet has a red cross-stitch letter "M" for identification. The laundry marks were always in red thread.

 

 

This image shows an example of a simple laundry identification mark on the hem (this is actually on a nightgown, but is the same mark that would have been on the bedding.)

This sheet close-up pictured below shows the center seam, which was always sewn edge-to-edge. This sheet was embroidered for decoration, rather than for simple identification, so it is done in white.

 

Yarn-drying at Gobelins factory in the 18th century

The famous French Gobelins tapestry factory started modestly as a dyers workshop during the 15th century, but came to prominence when it was purchased by the French king, Louis XIV in 1662.
King Louis XIV and his Minister of Finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert instituted strict guidelines for French manufacturing and severely limited imports that would compete with French-produced goods. The result was a major improvement in the quality and consistency of French products, most notably in the fields of textile production, tapestry weaving and glass and furniture production. (Note: Colbert's influence reached far beyond manufacturing - into finance, art, architecture, the country's infrastructure and more.)
The antique print below shows the yarn-drying atelier at the Gobelins factory. This original print is from the 18th century series of books entitled Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres, published in Paris by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, or as it is commonly called, Diderot's Encyclopedia.
In this engraving, the yarn-drying atelier is shown to have a wool carding table, a scale for weighing the yarn, large rings suspended from the ceiling to hang the yarn to dry, a stove to heat the room for drying and a hand-worked machine to wind the yarn into skeins. Notice that the workers are wearing wooden shoes. These wooden shoes are called sabots and were worn by workers across France - on farms, in vineyards and in factories.

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.

Inspiration from nature

The French countryside is awash in color during spring and the early weeks of summer. There are fields covered with wild red poppies, called coquelicot and houses draped in boughs of wisteria.
It's easy to see French textile manufacturers were inspired by the beauty of the surrounding countryside to create designs for floral printed fabrics.

 

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.

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.

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.