Brocaded in polychrome silks on a gold compound satin ground. Symmetrical pattern. Confronted Chinese figures with birds perched on their hands. Floral vines and palm trees. Birds standing on quivers of arrows. Selvedge on both sides of five cords and a wide stripe. Soiled, worn, with holes.  (Early Ming dynasty)

Brocaded in polychrome silks on a white silk satin ground.  Chinoiserie design with several scenes: two figures in a rowboat; a figure standing on a bridge between a small house and a rocky garden; a larger house with a porch from which a man appears to be feeding two swans.  In the interspaces, clouds, birds, etc.  Both pieces worn and stained.  The back (a) is composed of one large piece and two fragments added, one to each side, at the top.  Holes on the seat (b).

By the mid-eighteenth century, French silks made in Tours, Nîmes, and above all Lyon dominated taste Europe-wide, increasingly surpassing Italian work. Such was the demand for colorful and naturalistically decorated furnishing silks like this example, as well as asymmetrically patterned dress silks, that it has been estimated that there were approximately 8,000 looms in Lyon by 1739. More than one third of the city’s inhabitants was involved in the silk industry as weavers and, more tangentially, spinners, dyers, merchants, and retailers.  This silk was displayed in European Textiles and Costume Figures, on view at the School of Industrial Arts in 1935, and at Walton High School in 1939.[Elizabeth Cleland, 2020]

1750~, Spitalfields

1750~, Spitalfields