Hanging a rug on the wall

From the earliest days of trade with the Levant, the French merchants brought exotic rugs, tapestries and textiles back to France. During the 19th century, it became fashionable in upper class homes to hang kilims and other Middle Eastern rugs on the walls or to suspend them as room dividers and portières.
The woven rugs were expensive and were very heavy, so it wasn't long before French textile manufacturers began producing kilim prints and rug prints as a more practical substitute in interior decoration. Below are several 19th century rug prints.

Wedding in white

In France, in days gone by, young women and their families carefully stitched the dozens of delicate pieces that made up a wedding trousseau. The trousseau would have included an array of bedding, intricately embroidered linens and nightwear as well as day dresses and articles of intimate apparel. Empress Josephine's trousseau included 500 lace-trimmed chemises!
The pictures below are of a 19th century embroidered and appliquéd white coverlet that would have been part of a wedding trousseau.

Ribbons tie it all together

Nineteenth century French textile designers often used a ribbon motif  as decoration for their central pattern while also letting the ribbons create a link between the larger elements in a design. This simple design motif was versatile and popular and remains so today.
The first below is a late-19th century fabric that uses a lacy-looking ribbon. The next example, with the white background from mid-19th century, has elegant striped ribbons with lacy edges.

The next three have very similar ribbon-tied motifs and all three from the late 19th century.

The next is a late-19th century cotton damask ticking with a meandering ribbon motif.

The last is a 1920s fabric with a large-scale motif of flower-filled baskets, jauntily held together with lavender ribbons.

Lovely medieval town of Puisserguier, France

In 2002, when a local businessman in Puisserguier started to build a car wash on the edge of the village, the backhoe uncovered an Iron Age cemetery. The archaeologists heralded it as one of the most important Iron Age sites in France. Under French law, the government was able to claim the land temporarily so they could devote many months to completing an archaeological dig. Finally all specimens were removed to Paris for study and local construction resumed.
Puisserguier is a charming village with more than a thousand years of written history. With the archaeological discovery, the villagers can now claim an even more ancient ancestry than they'd previously bragged about.  
Here are a few photos. 
Below is a photo of the medieval chateau that dominates the hill on which the town was built, taken last July in the early morning.

The village seen from the nearby bluff that harbors the church of St-Christophe, the patron saint of Puisserguier.  The patchwork of fields are vineyards:

And here is the church of St-Christophe, sheltered in tall pine trees. St-Christophe is the saint that protects the vineyards and the residents of Puisserguier and this is his local home. Every June, ceremonies are held at the St-Christophe church to ensure another good year of vines and wine.

Empress Josephine loved Roses

Although roses have been cultivated for many centuries, it was only in the latter part of the 18th century that the rose began to be cultivated for its bloom rather than simply for use in perfume or in medicinal extracts.

 

Josephine Bonaparte, who loved to create lavish landscapes and gardens at her homes in France, became entranced with the beauty of roses and obsessively collected every type. She managed to obtain many rare English hybrids, even when France was at war with England. She gave financial support to several exploratory expeditions in exchange for the promise of new cultivars for herself. The rose garden at her home at Malmaison was famous for its more than 250 types of roses. Cuttings and root stocks were generously sent to parks and towns throughout France, creating rose gardens in all parts of the republic that we can still enjoy today.

The general public in France closely followed everything done by Napoleon and by Josephine, even after their divorce. Josephine's rose garden created a huge demand for roses and for motifs using roses in porcelain, ceramic and in textiles.

(Click on any image to enlarge.) 
The three images immediately below are early to mid-19th century depictions of roses, done on glazed cotton. The first, on a pale blue-green background, depicts a large central bouquet of fresh roses mixed with other flowers. The second is a classic French pattern of delicate climbing roses that was reproduced in endless variations; this one is unusual with the color choice of red and faded tan. The third fabric uses a striated pale gray background with a foreground of gracefully climbing delicate baby roses. This particular motif reflects the popular oriental style that was influencing design in that era.

One of my favorites from that same era was the top of a quilt that I showed in a previous post. This lovely pattern in blue and dark brown uses intertwined roses, tassles, wreaths and coral sprigs:

The botanically correct rose was always popular and was very much favored for use in textile design. The next seven images are all French textiles from the second half of the 19th century. Some of these renderings depict roses so real one can almost smell them! My favorite is the first one below with what looks like a tea rose on a pale, pale yellow background, but all of these are exceptional in the details - the excellent engraving of the roller, the choice and subtlety of colors and the fine printing techniques.

Stylized interpretations of roses were also popular motifs during the second half of the 19th century - less realistic, but allowing more leeway in artistic interpretation:

The Art Nouveau period and the 1920s produced some interesting and very stylized representations of roses:

A next fabric, also from the Art Nouveau era, is one that I find to be rather schizophrenic. It uses a beautiful botanically correct motif of roses in a 19th century style but pairs it with stylized Art Nouveau semi-transparent white climbing flowers. A most unusual design!

During the 1920s, one begin to see more abstract and deconstructed motifs as well as the very streamlined Art Deco motifs inspired by the 1925 Paris show - Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The next four pictures illustrate a few of the wide variety of styles that emerged during that era.

The very stylized Art Deco rose from the 1920s has an orange and gray striped background.  Almost as an after-thought, it throws in a few tiny songbirds and birds of paradise as accents, seemingly to lure those who don't like the extreme modern decorative look:

And, a no-holds-barred beautiful Art Deco rose in a screen printed cotton from the era. Magnifique!

In the economically lean pre-war years of the late 1930s, printing was often simplified to save production costs. This was done by reducing the number of colors used or simplifying the overall intricacy of the design.

But, roses were still emminently popular:

French antique woodland scene fabrics

Everyone knows Paris - the great city of art, beauty and culture. But outside of Paris, France is largely rural and agricultural. Driving along smaller departmental roads, I was amazed at the carefully-tended orchards, the acres and acres of hand-pruned vineyards and the many vegetable gardens in and around the villages.

La nature est belle.
The French revel in nature. They love a lazy afternoon in the country or a hike in the woods and always prefer to eat locally-grown produce. During the 19th century, French people were even more entranced with nature and its mysteries. In this post, we'll examine the verdure textile designs - those illustrated with verdent woods, a forest glen or other foliage - designed to bring the outdoors in.

Most foliage textile designs incorporated a scene or vista with the central motif showing a grove of trees or a forest glen with an opening that would reveal a lake or chateau in the distance. The first example of this time-honored motif is the 19th century fabric pictured below. In this case, the view is onto an indistinct meadow.

Although this kind of woods and vista motif was a repeating theme, the color schemes were quite varied and often unusual. 



Below are several examples of 19th century woodland scenics. 

The first, with a off-white background and a foreground motif in olive, khaki, rose and mauve, the vista revealed is of a bubbling waterfall. 

The next piece has a brown and tan forest glen with exotic flowers as the central motif that is printed on a greenish-gray background. This piece encompasses the traditional forest theme, but is quite unusual in the use of the oriental-style trees and bushes.

Verdure prints were also made that depicted woods or semi-jungle motifs, but did not incorporate a scene or vista.  Three such printed fabrics are shown below. The first is a crowded motif that is thick with trees, bushes and many smaller plants, all done in muted blues and rusty browns. The plants are all fantasy plants and are not botanically identifiable.

The second swatch has a sparser design that is created by using tall spindly trees and rangy bushes.  The main color is teal, which was a favorite in many leaf and verdure prints in the second half of the 19th century.

The last one in this post is the most unusual and is a favorite of mine. The designer chose a single large tree as the central motif, which  is reminiscent of the Indian tree-of-life patterns. The tree depicted is an oak tree with acorns and is done in the softest olive and tan shades with accents of very muted mauve. The oak tree was the most common tree in France and is a symbol of strength. Fluttering around the powerful tree are lively songbirds. Magnifique!