**Rhapsodic Objects**

# **Contact Zones**

Editors Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem

# **Volume 7**

# **Rhapsodic Objects**

Art, Agency, and Materiality (1700–2000)

Editors Yaëlle Biro, Noémie Étienne

This print publication and its Open Access version were generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lizenz. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

ISBN 978-3-11-065664-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075766-8 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757668 ISSN 2196-3746

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#### **Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek**

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2022 Yaëlle Biro, Noémie Étienne, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Unidentified artist(s), *Dessins des indiennes de traite,* Favre Petitpierre & Cie, Nantes, c. 1800–1825, book with gouache prints on paper, 33 × 42.4 cm, donated by Jean Mayet, Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Historical Museum Nantes (Inv. Nr. 941.8.9). [Historical Museum Nantes, photo: A.04.888] Detail. Copyediting: Aaron Bogart, Berlin Typesetting: Rüdiger Kern, Berlin Printed in the European Union

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### **Content**

Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Étienne **Introduction — 7**

#### Part 1: **Interlaced Patterns**

Dorothy Armstrong **Wandering Designs** The Repossession of the "Oriental" Carpet and Its Imaginary — **19**

Aziza Gril-Mariotte **The Art of Printed Textiles** Selecting Motifs in the Eighteenth Century — **41**

Chonja Lee **Chintzes as Printed Matter and Their Entanglement within the Transatlantic Slave Trade around 1800 — 57**

#### Part 2: **Embedded Relationships**

James Green **Interpretations of Central African Taste in European Trade Cloth of the 1890s — 81**

Helen Glaister **The Picturesque in Peking** European Decoration at the Qing Court — **99**

Rémi Labrusse and Bernadette Nadia Saou-Dufrêne **Cultural Intersections and Identity in Algeria on the Eve of the French Invasion** The Case of the Bey Palace in Constantine — **125**

#### Part 3: **Crafted Identities**

Ashley V. Miller **"What Is Colonial Art? And How Can It Be Modern?"** Design and Modernity in France and Morocco, 1925 — **151**

Victoria L. Rovine **Crafting Colonial Power** Weaving and Empire in France and French West Africa — **171**

Thomas Grillot **A World of Knowledge** Recreating Lakota Horse Effigies — **195**

Gail Levin **Frida Kahlo's Circulating Crafts** Her Painting and Her Identities — **211**

**Authors — 233 Picture Credits — 236**

### Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Étienne **Introduction**

A fragment of red-dyed cloth knotted onto an iron nail; almond-shaped pieces of white glazed ceramic positioned into the socket of the eyes; a section of an iron flingshot trigger embedded into a wooden sculptural form. These material fragments are all integral to the physical form given by a Kongo ritual practitioner, *nganga*, in collaboration with a Kongo master carver, to a *nkisi* or container of spiritual power, in the nineteenth century. The European origins of these three manufactured components (cloth, porcelain, and iron) are representative of art-making in a global world that had been connected through trade for centuries. Even the dye used to color red the cloth tied to an iron nail carries complex significance, as curator James Green will explain in the present volume. Collectively, the authors of this book focus on the layered significance of forms and materials that constitute art and material culture. Like the thread of a cloth, patterns, materials, and techniques can be unraveled, revealing along the way embedded histories and relationships. In our perspective, objects are simultaneously products and producers, results and processes, visions and stories. They are, in short, rhapsodic.

Art history as a discipline is evolving and encourages us today to study works of art in all their complexities and contradictions. How do we grasp material culture beyond a visual reading of a work's iconography or an anthropological study of its function in its original context? Is it possible to simultaneously consider its visual appearance together with its particular materiality and temporality? Moreover, how do these questions apply in the context of art history's expansion, as art historian Michael Yonan has emphasized, taking into account media such as textile or porcelain that were partly excluded from the Western concept of art.1

A multipart conference organized in 2018 in Paris at the alternative space La Colonie, and Los Angeles during the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association by the editors of this volume is at the root of the present publication.2 The intention, then and now, is to trace the movement and circulation of material culture while considering the singularity of the works themselves. While recognizing the key role of market forces in the dynamics of a work's circulation and reception, our approach focuses on the impact of such forces on an object's very production and the context at

**1** Michael Yonan, "Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture," *West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture* 18, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2011).

**2** *Circulating Crafts: Art, Agency, and the Making of Identities*. Part I at La Colonie, Paris (January 2018) and Part II, a two-session panel at the 106th Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Los Angeles (February 2018). We thank Kader Attia for providing us with the space of La Colonie that allowed us to think in depth about the issues presented in this volume.

Open Access. © 2022 Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Étienne, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lizenz https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757668-001

the root of its making. We hope to unpack the complex histories held within objects, from creation to consumption, as well as trace the central back-and-forth between demanders and suppliers to suggest a new mapping of the market for cultural goods in which the source countries could be positioned at the center, as active partners and not passive bystanders.

We propose to provide new scrutiny of what we call rhapsodic objects, going back to the Greek etymology of the word *rhaptein* (to stitch, sew, weave) and *oide* (song).3 Originally describing the recitation of epic poems, the term signals the assemblage of disparate stories that eventually compose a coherent and pleasing whole. Transposed from the orality and immateriality of epic poetry to the visuality and physicality of objects, the term keeps its power to speak about action and multiplicity. Indeed, if the word "rhapsodic" holds within itself the assemblage inherent to song making, "object" was born from the confrontation between diverse actors, materials, possibilities, and agendas in a complex world. *Ob-ject* stems from "thrown against," and the violent action of its Latin roots focuses on our relationship to objects, a primordial distancing from the self. As such, objects are profoundly tied to the human experience: they are enhancers, allowing us to see and apprehend the world. They are also shaping our daily life and generating emotions and desires. In this volume, we aim to unpack the stitched histories held within objects to reveal issues of power, trade dynamics, and representation, while redefining objects from passive things into the realm of the agential.

As early as the 1980s, art historian Krzysztof Pomian underlined how works of art could be considered as "semiophores," or "sign carrier."4 Anthropologists Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai further demonstrated that things can gain (or lose) values during their "lives," including becoming commodities.5 Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas developed the concept of "entanglement" in order to describe how objects can be caught in different systems or values that redefine them.6 In parallel, the study of the history of collection has grown since the 1980s, putting emphasis on the succession of buyers, owners, and modes of display of material culture. Lately, in the context of the discussions around the restitution of objects, the notion of provenance has taken on new significance. Provenance in art history allows drawing political and material histories of works of arts that extend widely beyond the sole context of their creation to investigate the many transmutations or mediations that surrounds their

**3** Walter J. Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word* (London and New York: Methuen & Co, 1982), 13.

**4** Krzysztof Pomian, "Pour une histoire des sémiophores: A propos des vases des Médicis," *Le Genre Humain* 1, no. 14 (1986): 51–62.

**5** Arjun Appadurai, ed., *The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

**6** Nicholas Thomas, *Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific*  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

"social lives." Heightened scrutiny of modes of collecting objects in the context of unbalanced power has encouraged academics and curators to explore and communicate more precisely the origins of art collections.

Yet, paradoxically, such approaches that emphasize the context of the objects' reception hold the risk of ignoring the specificity of singular artifacts and the framework of their creation. Indeed, the artworks themselves and their makers' intentions remain invisible, and one wonders if their materiality or their individual histories are making any difference at all in today's appreciation. Objects embody multiple authorships, agendas, and agencies. As the authors in this book argue, those key notions not only impact the works (instead of being seen as passively impacted by external, economic, and political forces, actors, regimes, or military conquests), but are also integral to them. Works embody their own complex and multilayered histories and should be perceived as always in flux, reconfigured, and transformed. They are simultaneously fragments of a dismantled world and micro-worlds in themselves, carrying within their materiality and temporality the dynamics of their context of production and use as well as a rich potential of interpretation.7

The series of close readings assembled in this volume demonstrate that studying the specificity of each work unpacks broader agendas embedded within. It is by unfolding the works' layered histories and the ways in which these narratives are encompassed within their physical and visual appearances that one can bring forward the political charges they encompass. Whether a single object or an ensemble, a genre of material or an artistic practice, the examples selected by the authors all demonstrate the complex nature of these rhapsodic works.

#### **Interlaced Patterns**

Historically, art history as an academic and museum-based discipline has put individual artists or schools of makers at the heart of its approach, going back to the roots of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century. But can we really trace the making of an artwork to a singular maker, culture, or even country? In her essay in this volume, which analyzes the production of carpets produced in Punjab between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries beyond a focus on authenticity and provenance, Dorothy Armstrong puts forward key questions tied to terminology and uses the expression "oriental carpet" as a concept that fluidly encompasses a political dimension. "Oriental" is a contested term for its vagueness and tendency to standardization, first famously

**7** For such a demonstration, see Anne Lafont, *Une africaine au Louvre en 1800: La place du modèle*  (Paris: Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2019). For more on the notion of "fragments," see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Objects of Ethnography," in *Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage* (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 17–78 and 284–92.

analyzed by Edward Said and often commented upon ever since.8 Yet, according to Armstrong, this choice of word (although referring to an unspecified geography) is precisely appropriate to locate a product whose fabrication involves a multiplicity of actors and territories. As she argues: "The oriental carpet, in addition to its traded and manufactured reality, is a mobile concept within such an archipelago of interacting sites of exchange, a concept materializing colonial systems of power, value and taste." In her opinion, a problematic and debated concept such as the "oriental carpet" can become a powerful tool to refuse a simplistic determination and show the complexity of the connections between a product and a territory.

Textiles are prototypical rhapsodic objects: literally stitched or woven, they convey their origins and the agendas of their creators. They reflect the expectations of the consumers and buyers, as much as they transform the interiors, peoples, and worlds in which they evolve.9 The production of printed cotton known in Europe as *indiennes* since the eighteenth century, studied in this book both by Aziza Gril-Mariotte and Chonja Lee, makes use of technical knowledge that originated in India. Yet as Gril-Mariotte demonstrates in her archival study of the 1766 registration pattern book of the French Oberkampf factory, it presents a mix of patterns from different regions, most of them flowers and geometric motifs. Only 16% of the total was actually listed as *indiennes* specifically. This proportion shows the diversity of expectations around one single production of textile, offering a great variety of options suited to multiple markets. In her essay, Lee focuses on *indiennes* produced in Switzerland and used as goods of trade, in addition to their use as clothing and for home decor, especially in the context of the trade of enslaved African peoples. Indeed, *indiennes* were in high demand from African elites, and patterns and colors were adjusted and adapted to suit the demanding African market, contributing to turning the highest profit in transactions that equated material goods with people.

To follow different kinds of textiles on the *longue durée*, from a woven carpet to printed cotton, allows us to unfold the multiple, transcultural, and transhistorical narratives connected to this particular medium. Because they are portable, light, and necessary to many cultures, textiles are paradigmatic for cross-cultural exchanges; they have circulated across continents since the Middle Ages, and continue to do so today, as the most important industries of textile production are still based in China and India. Furthermore, as the articles in the first part of this book demonstrate, such movements are sometimes embedded in the objects

**8** Edward W. Said, *Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient* (London: Penguin, 2001) [first edition 1978].

**9** Amelia Peck and Amy Elizabeth Bogansky, *Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500– 1800* (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2013); Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, *How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850* (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Sarah Fee, *Cloth that Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz*  (Ontario: Royal Ontario Museum, 2019).

themselves. Indeed, the expectations of African customers have transformed the choices of patterns or colors manufactured in Europe since the eighteenth century. By looking closely at such specific samples, art historians are capable of recovering untold stories, negotiations, and agendas that literary sources have not always recorded.

Works of art in general, and textiles as particularly telling examples, can be understood as *continuum* or *flux*. From the moment of their creation, cloths carry the power dynamics that generated them—and that will continue to reshape them during their material existence. Such objects also transform the world in which they stand, and generate new desire, economies, and cultural productions. However, this is not to say that scholarly attention to objects should become a new formalism or media theory, but rather that it should help to identify how power structures, commercial interests, and aesthetic preoccupations are sampled into a single object. Through such processes, close art-historical reading has the potential of bringing to the surface issues that would otherwise remain hidden from first sight.

#### **Embedded Relationships**

Circulation and the imitation of cultural products have historically been key factors in shaping the material world: artists, craftspeople, workshops, and factories sought to imitate and appropriate different techniques of making glass, porcelain, textiles, or lacquer objects. In eighteenth-century France, for instance, imitation of "oriental" lacquer led to the development of a "Made in France" varnish widely used by French cabinetmakers. Similarly, porcelain, a product originally exported from China and Japan, became a key material for European manufacturers producing wares that quickly came to be seen as typically "Dutch," "French," or "German." The desire to imitate specific technology or products coming from elsewhere paradoxically shaped local European identities.

Focusing on the points of connection between the British textile factories and Central African consumers, James Green investigates their common language, which was a shared appeal for textiles, from the earliest encounters in the fifteenth century to its oft-cynical market-based ramifications into the twentieth century. Through examples produced in Manchester and used in the Republic of Congo, Green focuses on the profound interconnection and the joint impact of the suppliers and consumers in the making of textiles (a telling example being the name "Congo Red" given to a red dye particularly popular in fabrics sold to Central Africa). The author also underlines the unexpected changes in values and functions attributed to cloths once they were incorporated in Central African culture, complicating further the concept of a maker's clearly defined identity. Indeed, looking closely at the global circulation of textiles blurs the lines between those who make and those thought to passively consume.

Both the creation and trajectories of rhapsodic objects are revealing of power relations. Since the nineteenth century, art historians have crafted a variety of terms in order to describe the ways eighteenth-century European artists and craftspeople have imitated the visual appearance of Asian material culture that circulated widely in Europe at the time, such as chinoiserie and *turquerie.*10 Centuries before the idea of cultural appropriation (a term that only entered the *Oxford English Dictionary* in 2017), the word chinoiserie reflected the reception of porcelain, lacquer, paintings, and engraving that were entering Europe at the time, imported through international trade companies such as the Dutch East India Company. Such objects are often presented as a fantasy, a purely decorative delirium aiming at entertaining the elite. Yet scholars such as Nebahat Avcioglù have powerfully demonstrated the political potential of such a stylistic mélange in the field of architecture.11

As a response, the term *euroiserie* has recently been adopted to characterize the reverse movement: Chinese art objects incorporating European forms and techniques. Helen Glaister's close study of a Qing dynasty China enameled porcelain flask held at London's Victoria and Albert Museum suggests the same logic deployed by the Chinese elite as by the European elite. *Euroiserie* is visually used as a means to express their international ambitions of worldliness—namely, in this case, materialize China's connection to Europe—a continent of particular economic and political interest at that time for the Manchus. Therefore, eighteenth-century *euroiserie* are, as Glaister demonstrates, more than the creative reception of different styles indicating a "taste" for European modes of depiction: they benefit from and transmit a complex Sino-centric agenda aiming to suggest the importance of China and its ability to incorporate other traditions. Thus, *euroiserie* participates—tacitly and materially—in communicating and furthering both formal and political ambitions.

Since the 1980s, scholars have emphasized the difficulty of assigning a precise style, defined by a specific geographic and temporal framework, to an object. In this respect, the concept of hybridity became central to underlining the multiplicity of styles or materials converging into a single artifact.12 However, hybridity has also been criticized for its tendency to suggest a natural process, echoing the world of botany, and for its implication of a hypothetical original "purity" that would exist by

**10** And more recently, a similar term has emerged in connection to the African continent: *africanerie.* See Anne Lafont, *L'art et la race: L'Africain (tout) contre l'œil des Lumières* (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2019), 253–316.

**11** Nebahat Avcioglù, *Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1737–1876* (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011).

**12** On the question of style see Susan E. Gagliardi and Yaëlle Biro, "Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa," *African Arts, First Word* 52, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 1–6.

contrast.13 How can we try to understand the so-called hybridity of things without embracing it as a natural phenomenon?

In 2005, the archaeologist John Hutnyk already warned against a celebratory use of concepts such as hybridity: "Syncretism and Hybridity are academic conceptual tools providing an alibi for lack of attention to politics, in a project designed to manage the cultural consequences of colonization and globalization."14 In fact, as the present collection of essays brings to light, hybridity can be perceived as the result of precise intercultural exchanges made for specific reasons and in particular contexts. Thus, "hybridity" itself has to be unpacked in order to reveal the political, social, and aesthetic forces embedded in an object. For instance, as Rémi Labrusse and Bernadette Nadia Saou-Dufrêne suggest in their article about Bey's Palace in Constantine, Algeria, built between mid-1820 and mid-1830 but which underwent several modifications that followed the region's tumultuous history, hybridity can have simultaneous aesthetic and political effects, with a long-lasting impact. Through his selection of forms as well as materials, the Bey of Constantine (and thus, the palace itself) sent visual messages to the French imperial forces demonstrating his command of the new political situation. Therefore, what the authors call "poetics of hybridity" is as much "politics of hybridity," embodying the positions of a ruler faced by colonial forces.

#### **Crafted Identities**

The concept of rhapsodic object also invites us to interrogate the agendas of the producers. Indeed, the makers of works from all origins and time periods should be considered as acting in full knowledge and understanding of the context that surrounds them. Nevertheless, the proper notion of an agenda, as a clear aim executed by fully aware actors, is to be challenged. Rather, it is essential to consider the often-experimental and organic modes of these productions, as well as the conflicts and dissensions potentially surrounding them. In an example from colonial-era Congo, the agendas of makers and collectors of Mangbetu arts often diverged, as explored in the 1990 exhibition *African Reflections* organized by Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim.15

**13** About the notion itself, see, among others, Homi K. Bhabha, who interestingly discusses the notion of hybridity in the context of orality, literature, and performance rather than material culture: "Signs Taken for Wonders: Question of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in *The Location of Culture* (London/New York: Routledge, 1985), 145–74. For a critical discussion of the notion, see for instance: Stephen W. Silliman, "A Requiem for Hybridity?" *Journal of Social Archaeology* 15, no. 3 (2015): 277–98.

**14** John Huthnyk, "Hybridity," *Ethnic and Racial Studies* 28, no. 1 (January 2005): 92.

**15** Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, *African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire* (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).

The curators investigated the immediate creative responses by Mangbetu artists to outside demands, and the subsequent appropriation by the Mangbetu royal court of the very objects favored by outsiders, which affirmed their agency in the context of growing political and economic pressure from European powers. The distinctive Mangbetu aesthetic developed in this context quickly came to be seen as "authentically" Mangbetu and filled ethnographic museums across Europe and America. There, they were reinterpreted as ethnographic specimens of a disappearing culture. The urge of craftspeople to produce artifacts understood as "traditional" and "authentic" is often connected to the desire to build a culture that is an actor of the world at large. Thus, many artifacts or techniques that came to be seen as local, authentic, and/or typical have to be situated in complex transnational narratives tied to a history of appropriation, imperialism, and the commercial phenomenon of supply and demand.

In this volume, Ashley Miller considers the work of Algerian ceramicist Boujemâa Lamali (ca. 1890–1971), whom, she argues, negotiated the expectations of the French Protectorate arts administration in Morocco (broadly asking for a form of "traditional authenticity" and cultural preservation of "local production"), and yet managed to develop new forms that spoke to modernity. Questioning the dichotomy between "traditional" and "modernity," Miller demonstrates how Lamali's body of work should be envisioned as binding "traditional" techniques with vocabularies and the formal agenda of modernist innovations. The artist's understanding of the context in which he operated allowed him to turn preservation into transformational forces, which further had a lasting impact on the perception of Morocco's crafts in the broader international cultural community.

Victoria L. Rovine's study of West African weaving techniques under colonial rule demonstrates the contentious relationship between the region's strip-loom and technologies tentatively implemented by the colonial powers. The author carefully identifies the tensions between "the need to improve yet preserve" the knowledge of colonial subjects in "the theater of French colonial Empire." Extensive documentation played a central role in the imperial endeavors, providing today's researcher with rich archives. Through her investigation of these archives, Rovine establishes how the making of textiles was integrated into a larger propaganda discourse of crafts and technicity and how objects and techniques were instrumentalized for political purposes.

Thomas Grillot's investigation of Lakota artist Wallace "Butch" Thunderhawk (b. 1946) and his carving of horse effigies offers an in-depth look into the process of knowledge production, the role of community in artistic practice, and the possibilities offered by finding contemporary relevance in earlier forms of visual expression. Finally, Gail Levine turned the topic of individual agency toward the very concept of identity in her study of artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). She demonstrates Kahlo's negotiated identity, using her own art and the building of narratives, to define herself in the largest possible sense, from her embrace of a Jewish identity to her use of *Tehuana*  clothing and in her painting practice.

When applied to material culture, the term "rhapsodic" allows objects to be perceived in all their complexity: active, cumulative, narrative, but also changeable and dynamic. Human-made products, they are also makers of humans. The examples presented in this volume of collected essays, individually and collectively, investigate the many layers woven within. They address issues central to the current practice of art history, such as tensions between authenticity and modernity, the political nature of visual language, terminology and categories, the production and dissemination of knowledge, the role of trade and commerce, and underline the objects and their makers' complex agency. This book aims to put objects at the center of a narrative that complicates the opposition between their production and reception. It puts forward art history as a discipline capable of unfolding the many dimensions held within in the composite temporalities and materiality of objects.

Finally, how do we acknowledge the histories embedded in the materiality of an object without necessarily celebrating them? Art history and heritage studies are battlefields, and the utter violence of colonization, imperialism, and global trade has to be understood and underlined in our disciplines. Yet, in order to avoid misinterpretation and sometimes abusive readings, we believe that taking a closer, informed look at material culture can lead to stronger critical positions. As stated earlier, *rhapsodicity* is tied to actions and performances; the rhapsody is produced by the active assemblage of disparate narratives. It is both a process and a result per se. The notion of *rhapsodicity* allows a simultaneous view on actions, actors, and the thing itself as a source and an archive.

#### Part 1: **Interlaced Patterns**

#### Dorothy Armstrong **Wandering Designs**

The Repossession of the "Oriental" Carpet and Its Imaginary

Production of so-called oriental carpets is carried out in the geographies currently described as Iran, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia. These geographies have been the subject of repeated colonization over many centuries. As a consequence carpets produced there offer a rich site for thinking about local, national, regional and imperial identities, and exchange during processes of colonization and decolonization. This essay focuses on one of these geographies of production, Punjab, and the response of its carpet industry to the rise and fall of the British imperial project from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and to the residual impact of the Mughal imperial project from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The work of scholars on the constructed nature of interpretations of the colonized by the colonizer offers a platform for this essay.1 It also draws on thinking which emphasizes the importance of analyzing material culture within a network of many sites of exchange, each with permeable boundaries, producing loops of change and resistance to change.2 Building from these concepts, I argue here that the oriental carpet, in addition to its traded and manufactured reality, is a mobile concept within such an archipelago of interacting sites of exchange, a concept materializing colonial systems of power, value, and taste.

This approach differs fundamentally from much specialist and scholarly writing on oriental carpets which, since the nineteenth century, has focused and continues to focus on provenance and authenticity.3 This writing, until quite recently mostly North American and European, created a canon of oriental carpets. Underlying its methods and conclusions is the assumption that there is a stable and objective hierarchy of aesthetic and cultural value in carpets, which can be judged through their places and methods of location, their materials, and designs.

This monolithic approach contrasts markedly with the multivariant response to carpets in their indigenous countries of production. These are often strongly marked

 Open Access. © 2022 Dorothy Armstrong, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lizenz https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757668-002

**1** For example, Edward Said, *Orientalism* (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Homi K. Bhabha, *The Location of Culture* (New York: Routledge, 1994); Walter Mignolo, *Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

**2** For example, Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley, eds., *Global Design History* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., *The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World* (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

**3** Key figures include Wilhelm Bode (German, 1845–1929), William Morris, (British, 1834–1896), Alois Riegl (Austrian, 1858–1905), Arthur Upham Pope (American 1881–1969) and May Hamilton Beattie (Scottish 1908–1997).

by the perspective of the maker. So, for instance, in tribal or village communities, many of whose members are weavers working on carpets for their own use, intimate accounts are given of the quality of materials and workmanship, and physical and emotional history of weavings.4 Equally, within the commercial industry there is a high valuation of customer responsiveness, be it in weaving for local clients or the export market, and on the practice of revered master weavers.5 Meanwhile, museological assessments in countries of production express different national agendas to each other, and to those in countries of consumption in Europe and North America. 6

The traditional European and North American reading is in essence connoisseurial, and has an important role in underpinning the vigorous market for old oriental carpets. This essay challenges the connoisseurial assumption of a set of enduring verities of oriental carpet quality, instead analyzing carpets as a manifestation of repeated conceptual and material reinvention across geographies and cultures, meeting local social, economic, and political needs. To ground this argument, the essay analyzes a range of carpets which are often marginalized because they do not meet these connoisseurial expectations, and consequently receive little or no scholarly attention.

The particular carpets investigated were made in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Punjab, and in Pakistan from independence and partition in 1947.7 These carpets sit in a contested relationship with the European and North American commitment to a stable and objective hierarchy of aesthetic and cultural value in carpets, with the idea of the traditional and unchanging at its heart.

In India under British rule, this commitment to the traditional in Indian crafts became part of colonial ideology. The essay contrasts carpets made under the direct influence of the imperial power and its commitment to tradition in, for example, jails, with those made in commercial environments, described by the British in colonial India as the 'private industry'. It goes on to explore how both the Punjabi private industry and the later Pakistani commercial industry challenged that idea of the traditional in carpets by transforming quickly in response to technological change, commercial ties to new markets, and the changing political and economic environment. By exploring locations of production, such as factories, prisons, and cities, rather than the court ateliers, tribal tents, and village workshops of European and North

**4** Anna Badkhen, *The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village* (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).

**5** Hadi Maktabi, *The Persian Carpet: The Forgotten Years 1722–1882* (London: Hali Publications, 2019), 207–56.

**6** See, for instance, the contrasting accounts and displays of carpets given by the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul, and the two museums of Iranian carpets in Tehran and Mashhad, Iran.

**7** Carpets from Doris Leslie Blau, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Templeton Carpet Factory, Glasgow; PAK Persian Carpet Company, Lahore; Lahore Carpet Manufacturing Company, Lahore.

American imagination and preference, the essay uncovers some less-frequently told histories of the craft of carpet weaving.

For both Punjab and Pakistan, contemporaneous records of production and commercial organization and examples of reception are used as primary evidence, alongside carpet manufacturers' marketing materials.8 The close study of these contested carpets, and the interrogation of primary materials about their production and reception provides the platform to return these carpets to the narrative.

Therefore this text is not a connoisseurial account of the provenance and value, commercial or aesthetic, of these carpets. Indeed, the carpets it examines have been at times regarded by connoisseurs as low-value and low-quality commercial export products or copies.9 Nor is it an attempt to trace linear stylistic development, an approach to design which is arguably based on a Eurocentric ideology of progressive evolution which took hold from the mid-nineteenth century onward.10 Instead, it explores the loops of transformation and resistance involved in the modification of a traditional artifact, and of the system for evaluating it.

#### **What Is an "Oriental" Carpet?**

At the heart of this discussion are patterned pile carpets woven across Eurasia since at least 300 BCE.11 Patterned pile carpets share structure with other woven textiles. Their unique characteristic is the introduction of knots, really loops, between the

**8** London, Victoria and Albert Museum Archives, MA/2/1/1–3, "Mr. C. Purdon Clarke's visit to and purchases in India"; *Indian Industrial Commission, Minutes of Evidence* (Calcutta, 1916–18), 5 vols.; C. Latimer, *Monograph on Carpet Making in the Punjab, 1905–6* (Lahore, 1907); B. H. Baden Powell*, Handbook of the Manufactures and Arts of the Punjab,* vol. 2 of *Handbook of the Economic Products of the Punjab* (Lahore: Punjab Printing Company, 1872); *Report on the Punjab Exhibition 1881–82: Selections from the Records of the Government of the Punjab and its Dependencies,* n.s., no. xxii (Lahore: Punjab Government Secretariat Press, 1883). *Threadlines Pakistan* (Karachi: Ministry of Industries, Government of Pakistan in concurrence with the United Nations Development Programme, 1977); *Pakistan Economic Survey* (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan Finance Division Economic Advisors Wing, 1977); *Pakistan Export Promotion Bureau Data* (Islamabad, 2006); *Handmade Carpet Manufacturing* (Karachi: State Bank of Pakistan, 2015); The Pakistani Carpet Manufacturing and Export Association, accessed June 19, 2021, https://pcmea.org.pk.

**9** For nineteenth century views see George Birdwood, *Industrial Arts of India*, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880); J. K. Mumford, *Oriental Carpets* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), 257–59. The leading international carpet periodical *Hali* does not cover modern Pakistani export production. **10** For example, Alois Riegl, *Problems of Style* (1893), trans. Evelyn Kane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Gottfried Semper, *Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts* (1860), trans. Michael Robinson, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004).

**11** The date of the oldest preserved carpet, the Pazyryk, found in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, production area unknown, possibly Persia. Now in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

**Fig. 1:** Structure of knotted pile carpet.

horizontal weft threads. The decisions made by the weaver about the color of thousands of knots gradually build up the pattern in the carpet (**fig. 1**).

Usually described as oriental carpets, these heavy handwoven textiles are anthropologically complex objects. Some were made within sophisticated societies such as imperial Persia, Anatolia, India, and China. Some have been and are still made in nomadic and village societies organized for tribal sustainabil-

ity, such as those of the Turkmen Federation, or in coercive factory systems like those of the Ottoman Empire or parts of modern South Asia. Carpets participate in diverse economic environments; they can be urban export goods, village cash crops, or an integral part of a sheep-based nomadic economy. Their functions are equally diverse. They play a role in political processes of diplomatic gifting and the performance of kingship, where they express status and power. The tribal or village family's collection of carpet objects, including floor and wall coverings, beds, doors, storage bags, and animal trappings are at one and the same time functional domestic items and the family's wealth and its currency for trade. Carpets are an expression of the aesthetic and the sensual, but are also an exercise in spirituality, evidenced by the strong association between oriental carpets and Islam.

In the Asian carpet-weaving belt, there is a history of exchange between different environments in which carpets are made. The court ateliers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islamic emperors who commanded the most expensive resources, the urban workshops of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Iran, Turkey, and India, which produced carpets in volume for a European and North American market shared techniques, materials, and designs with nomadic and village weavers.From at least 300 BCE, oriental carpet weaving has been a circulating craft.

#### **Creating a European and North American Hierarchy of "Oriental" Carpets: 1840–1900**

From around 1840, there was a transformation in the intensity of the encounter between Europe and North America and oriental carpets, as a diverse set of European and North American scholarly, artistic, commercial, and popular agents became strongly engaged with them. By the 1870s, this had reached the peak described by economic historians and carpet specialists as the oriental carpet boom.12

The oriental carpet boom had multiple causes. Throughout the nineteenth century, European and North American exploration and colonialism created encounters with societies producing these artifacts. Improving trade links and communications brought a greater number and variety of types of carpets to the European market.13 From the mid-nineteenth century onward, international exhibitions brought both contemporary commercial production and old carpets to a wider public,14 and newly developing museums across Europe and North America displayed exemplary versions.15 Collectors, dealers, and intermediaries provided carpets for these foundational collections, establishing European and North American connoisseurial standards in the process.16 Meanwhile, an increase in and wider distribution of disposable income throughout the nineteenth century enabled more people to decorate their houses with carpets.17 In the second half of the nineteenth century, magazines and periodicals advertised carpets and gave taste advice on how to choose and use them,18 while department stores made them easy to acquire.19

The boom saw an increase in the volume of oriental carpets traded in Europe and America, to a larger and more socially and educationally diverse group of consumers. The commercial opportunity led to a reorganization of oriental carpet weaving by entrepreneurs, producers and traders from both areas of indigenous production and Europe and North America, and to the establishment of a preferred European

**12** Annette Ittig, "CARPETS xi. Qajar Period," *Encycloaedia Iranica*, IV/8, 877–883, last updated: December 15, 1990, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/carpets-xi; Donald Quataert, *Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 134–42. **13** Leonard Helfgott, *Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet* (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 194), 83–125.

**14** For example, the Great Exhibition, London, 1851, the Exposition Universelle, 1878, Paris, "Old Oriental Carpets," 1891, Vienna.

**15** These included the South Kensington Museum in London (1852/7), the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris (1905), the Kunstgeberwemuseum in Berlin (1868), the HandelsMuseum (1887) and the K. K. Osterreichische Museum fur Kunst und Industrie (1863), both in Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1870), and the Chicago Art Institute (1879).

**16** Examples include Wilhelm Bode, Robert Murdoch Smith and Arthur Upham Pope, Goupil Brothers in Paris, Delekian Brothers in New York, Vincent Robinson in London.

**17** Deborah Cohen, *Household Gods: The British and their Possessions,* (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006), 12–13.

**18** For example, Charles Eastlake, *Hints on Household Taste* (London: Longman Green and Co., 1869). For influential magazines see Cohen, *Household Gods* (ibid.), 65–76.

**19** Michael B. Miller, *The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869–1920* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Vicki Howard, *From Main Street to Mall* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

and North American commercial style.20 It was also a period of reassessment of the quality, nature, and history of oriental carpets by European and North American collectors, connoisseurs, curators, and scholars.

The oriental carpet boom was a moment of discontinuity in carpet weaving, when change accelerated. As the industry mobilized to take the commercial opportunity, anxiety arose among European and North American commentators about the quality of carpets produced in and exported from Persia, Turkey, and India in response to the boom.21 This took the form of a moral and commercial panic, moral in the sense that the aesthetic and cultural qualities the oriental carpet represented to the West might be compromised by increased contemporary indigenous production, and commercial in the sense that the market for carpets might be reconfigured economically by the increased volume of carpets being made available:

At the time of which I am speaking, carpets had very seldom been exported from Persia, and consequently there was no rubbish manufactured; now it is quite different. If a very good carpet is wanted, an old one must be bought.22

In this strongly-worded statement, C. J Wills (1842–1912), a medical officer with the Indo-European Telegraph company in Persia between 1866 and 1881, reveals the confidence of the colonizer in evaluating the culture of "the other." Putting the best oriental carpet production in the past was "a denial of coevalness," a distancing mechanism which Johannes Fabian identifies as an indicator of a Western inability to engage with the material culture of non-Western groups on terms of equality.23

Historical evidence does not support Wills's assertion. Oriental carpets were traded across Eurasia from at least 300 BCE.24 However, Wills's assumption that indigenous producers and entrepreneurs could not be trusted to respond to new markets

**20** For Persia, Annette Ittig, "The Kirmani Boom: A Study in Carpet Entrepreneurship," *Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies*, vol. 1 (1985):111–23; for Turkey, Donald Quataert, *Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 134–60. For India Tirthankar Roy, *Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 197–231.

**21** This was widespread, but for example see, Alois Riegl, *The Relationship between Oriental Carpet Fabrication and Western Europe* (Vienna, 1891); Vincent Robinson, "Indian Carpets," *Oriental Carpets,* ed. Caspar Purdon Clarke (London: South Kensington Museum, 1892); William Morris, *Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London and Nottingham 1878–1881* (London: Ellis and White, 1882); and G. C. M. Birdwood, *Industrial Arts*, (1880).

**22** C. J. Wills, *In the Land of the Lion and the Sun or Modern Persia, Being Experiences of Life in Persia during a Residence of Fifteen years in Various Parts of That Country from 1866 to 1881* (London, 1891), 149.

**23** Johannes Fabian, *Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 31.

**24** C. Parham, "How Altaic/Nomadic Is the Pazyryk Carpet?," *Oriental Rug Review* 13/5 (June–July 1993): 34–39.

and technologies was fundamental to the European and North American narrative of oriental carpets. Leading commentators such as Alois Riegl (1858–1905) curator of textiles at the Handelsmuseum in Vienna, and Caspar Purdon Clarke (1846–1911), director of the South Kensington Museum in London, both expressed the view that the quality of contemporaneous production of oriental carpets in their countries of indigenous production could only be ensured if it were supervised by Europeans.25

This moral and commercial panic resulted in the creation of a European and North American hierarchy of so-called better and worse carpets. The characteristics of "better" carpets were the use of preindustrial and local materials, technologies, methods, skills, and designs. Carpets made using any kind of industrialization, from mechanized spinning or weaving, through factory dye-synthesis, or those that used designs from outside their local area, were lower in the hierarchy. Contemporaneous carpets made for export were particularly suspect. European and North American opinion formers believed that these characteristics enabled them to discriminate between carpets that were "authentic" expressions of "traditional" cultures, and those that were not.

This hierarchy bears the marks of orientalism at work, of the colonizer defining the material culture of the colonized as a means of exercising control over it, just as the French Encyclopedists accompanying Napoleon defined Egypt, in Edward Said's famous example.26 Taking possession of the imaginary of these carpets through a constructed hierarchy of value also created a new source of cultural capital within the nineteenth-century capitalist West, a means to demonstrate superior knowledge, taste, and resources, and gain individual competitive edge.27 The European and North American hierarchy of oriental carpets offered a tool of control that operated exogamously, across the West's colonies and para-colonies, and endogamously, within its own geographies, society and culture.

The particular qualities valued by European and North American commentators suggest a desire to retreat from the trauma of industrialization and globalization, identified by Glenn Adamson as a driver of nineteenth-century craft revivalism.28 They wished to freeze-frame the oriental carpet at a pre-industrial moment for their own psychological and political purposes, defining this as the "tradition" of "authentic" oriental carpets.

Indigenous producers in South, Central, and West Asia manifested a more flexible attitude to technological innovation, commercial opportunity, and design reinven-

**25** Caspar Purdon Clarke, "Oriental Carpets," *Oriental Carpets: The Catalogue of the 1891 Exhibition at the Handels-Museum, Vienna*, ed. Caspar Purdon Clarke (London: South Kensington Museum, 1892); Riegl, *Oriental Carpet Fabrication*, 214.

**26** Said, *Orientalism*, 79–88.

**27** Pierre Bourdieu, *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste*, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–55.

**28** Glenn Adamson, *The Invention of Craft* (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 211–14.

**Fig. 2:** Hand-knotted sampler (*wagireh*), wool, Bijar, Persia, early twentieth century.

borrowings, *narche gashtai,* wandering designs.30

Operating within this model of adaptation and exchange, producers from South, Central and West Asia took the emerging commercial opportunities of industrialization, globalizing markets, and the oriental carpet boom and at the same time energized their craft traditions. These developments did not align comfortably with the freeze-framed hierarchy of oriental carpets established by a West struggling to come to terms with modernity.

The result was an effort to transfer agency from the indigenous producers of oriental carpets to hegemonic tastemakers in Europe and North America, and to put control of the speed and nature of change, circulation, and reinvention into their

tion. Adoption of nineteenth-century technologies such as industrially produced dyes, new materials like cross-bred merino wool, and of semi-industrial factory methods, was part of the response in Turkey, Persia, and India to the opportunities offered by the oriental carpet boom. This adaptiveness was not unique to nineteenth-century circumstances, but was rooted in the history of transfer in weaving technology and materials across Eurasia, of which the spread of silk and the drawloom are examples.

Furthermore, there is evidence of long-standing heterodoxy toward design in these geographies. The best efforts of European and North American taxonomists to associate places and time periods with specific designs are frustrated by the fusions, borrowings, and *bricolage* of oriental carpet patterns (**fig. 2**).29 The tribal weavers of the borders of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran have a specific term for these

**29** The foundational practitioner of this was Bode, see, for example, Wilhelm Bode and Ernst Kuhnel, *Antique Rugs from the Near East*, trans. Charles Grant Ellis (Berlin: Klikhardt and Biermann, 1958), 94. **30** R. D. Parsons, *The Carpets of Afghanistan*, (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1983), 212.

hands. This contest for agency in the production and design of oriental carpets is vividly demonstrated in the case of carpets from pre-independence Punjab and post-partition Pakistan.31

### **Creating Imperial Identities through Carpets in Punjab, 1540–1900**

Punjab experienced two major imperial interventions from the sixteenth century, that of the Mughals (1526–1857) and that of the British (1849–1947), both of which were materialized in their carpets.32 Under the Mughal emperors Akbar (1542–1605), Jahangir (1569– 1627), and Jahan (1592–1666) elite patterned pile carpets became part of the demonstration of imperial power, as they were in contemporaneous Safavid Persia.33 Two distinctive local styles developed, one strongly influenced by Persian design traditions, and one by European botanical illustrations (**fig. 3**).34 The design of their carpets exemplifies the Mughal imperial project to establish connections with

**34** R. Skelton, "A Decorative Motif in Mughal Art," *Aspects of Indian Art: Papers Presented in a Symposium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970*, ed. Pratapaditiya Pal (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 147–52.

**Fig. 3:** Mughal carpet, Lahore, Punjab or Kashmir, ca. 1650, wool pile, cotton foundation.

**31** At Indian independence in 1947, Punjab was partitioned between India and the new Muslim state of Pakistan. For a summary of carpet weaving in Punjab see Nasreen Askari and Rosemary Crill, *Colours of the Indus: Costume and Textiles of Pakistan* (London: Victoria and Albert Museum/Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1997), 95.

**32** A short-lived indigenous Sikh Empire existed between 1799 and 1849.

**33** Kishwar Rizvi, *The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran* (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 93; Daniel Walker, *Flowers Under Foot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era* (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 3–15.

both the culturally powerful Safavid Empire and the intellectual innovation coming from Europe. Lahore in Punjab was one of the earliest and most important centers of Mughal carpet making, and radical adaptation and identity making were built into it from that point on.35 Court patronage lapsed under the later Mughal emperors, and the Sikh rulers who dominated Punjab in the early nineteenth century were less interested in carpet production.36 Urban factories that had produced more accessible versions of Mughal court carpets declined, and there was little of the domestic and rural production found in Iran, Anatolia, and Central Asia.37 In 1849, the British East India Company seized Punjab, and in 1857, in common with other EIC territories in the subcontinent, it came under direct British rule.

The British set out to revive the carpet making industry in Punjab, first for economic reasons, and then as part of the British project to define and preserve what they saw as "traditional" Indian culture.38 Arindam Dutta has vividly evoked the dynamism of the colonial process by which Britain took possession of the material culture of India, reimagining and physically remaking it to dovetail with the British imperial agenda.39 He describes a cultural system in India of British art schools, museums and exhibitions, publications, regimental workshops, and jails, all responding to the agenda set by the Department of Arts and Sciences in London, and embodied by the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Musuem.

Carpets were an important part of this cultural system. The moral and commercial panic among European and American commentators about the impact of industrialization and a global market on "traditional" carpets was particularly marked in the discourse on Indian carpets.

Indian carpets sold today are wholly modern creations. The antique fabrics, many of which were admirable, are no longer to be had. ... The industrial development of India under English rule dissipated the old methods so rapidly that within twenty-five years after the first public exhibition of these fabrics in London, in 1851, the carpet product had become entirely altered in character.40

The solution to the "dissipation" described by American commentator J. K. Mumford in 1903 was for the new imperial power to "rescue" Indian carpets. Through their

**35** The lack of surviving examples makes it difficult to discuss the pre-Mughal period.

**36** Susan Stronge, "The Arts of the Court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh," *The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms*, ed. Susan Stronge (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 1999), 74–91.

**37** Tirthankar Roy, *Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199.

**38** C. Latimer, *Monograph on Carpet Making in the Punjab, 1905–6* (Lahore, 1907); B. H. Baden Powell*, Handbook of the Manufactures and Arts of the Punjab,* vol. 2 of *Handbook of the Economic Products of the Punjab* (Lahore: Punjab Printing Company, 1872).

**39** Arindam Dutta, *The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility*, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–39.

**40** J. K. Mumford, *Oriental Carpets* (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), 252.

art schools, regimental workshops, and most significantly in their jails, the British in India directly imposed their vision of what an oriental carpet should be, in terms of methods of production, materials, and ornament.

The work carried out by Indian inmates in British jails in India was intended to be primarily punitive, with a second objective that of defraying jail costs. Unusually, carpets were produced in jail workshops for the commercial export market fueled by the oriental carpet boom. Some jail carpets

**Fig. 4:** Carpet, wool, Lahore Central Jail, ca. 1880, Victoria and Albert Museum.

were direct copies of Mughal and Indo-Persian carpets collected by the indigenous Indian aristocracy.41 However, a carpet woven in Lahore jail around 1880 exemplifies a more complex process of borrowing and exchange (**fig. 4**). The ornamental plane of the carpet has a field structure of wreaths and cartouches containing blossoms, and a strong palette of red, black, and dark blue. Alongside its Indo-Persian *millefleurs*  characteristics, it has a relationship to urban Persian carpet making of the nineteenth century. It contains no hint of the innovative, specifically Mughal botanical style showing whole plants, sometimes including their roots.

The British preference for Persian styles was part of a Persophilia that had intensified during the nineteenth century, as racial hierarchies developed in Europe within which Persians were perceived as second only to northern Europeans. The Persian Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), famed for its cultural and intellectual excellence, was seen as a particularly attractive model for nineteenth-century European empire builders.42 But Persophilia in India also had a local character. British colonialists preferred to identify themselves with Persia and its past glories, rather than the Mughal Empire, which even in decline offered resistance to the British. When Indian groups rose up against the British in 1857, in the events variously known as the Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion, and the First Indian War of Independence, depending on the cultural and political affiliations of the commentator, the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah (1775–1862) was their symbolic leader.

**41** Abigail McGowan, "Convict Carpets: Jails and the Revival of Historic Carpet Design in Colonial India," *The Journal of Asian Studies,* vol. 72, no. 2 (May 2013): 391–416.

**42** For the historiography of European and North American Persophilia see Yuka Kadoi and Ivan Szanto, eds., *The Shaping of Persian Art: Collections and Interpretations of the Art of Islamic Iran and Central Asia* (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 4–6.

The Lahore rug was displayed in the jail carpet category of the British-organized Punjab exhibition of 1881–82, where it was one of two jail carpets bought for the South Kensington Museum by Caspar Purdon Clarke.43 One of these two carpets won first prize in the exhibition, and one is now misplaced.44 The catalogue description is too generic for a confident identification of the illustrated carpet as the prizewinner, but the two carpets were considered the most worthy of purchase by Clarke. Both the purchases and the prize were signals to Punjabi producers that such Indo-Persian styles were the ornamental vocabulary of a British-authorized idea of the "traditional" Indian carpet. The exhibition catalogue describes the prizewinning carpet as copied from a Persian or Indo-Persian carpet in the "Maison de Louvre." This carpet does not appear to be in the Louvre, so its source was probably from the contemporaneous Parisian department store, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre.45 The carpet was doubly endowed with Persophilia, French and British. It also claimed the cachet of a source in "the capital of the nineteenth century," Paris, the dominant cultural center in Europe.46

Caspar Purdon Clarke bought the two jail carpets as part of a £5,000 shopping trip for Indian goods, with the aim of establishing a systematic teaching collection of Indian crafts to improve the design quality of British manufacturing.47 They became part of a loan collection sent by the Department of Science and Arts to British industrial centers such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow, where machinemade versions of such carpets were produced (**fig. 5**). The prizewinning replica of an Indo-Persian carpet collected by Parisian taste-makers, made in colonial Lahore as part of the imposition of British cultural and political values, was reimagined and remade for the imperial parlor and the colonial lounge in the UK's manufacturing cities, then sold across the UK and its settled territories.

Carpets like the two from Lahore jail helped unlock the potential of Indian crafts for British capitalism. They offer an example of an Indian "tradition" which had been mediated by Parisian collectors, reimagined by the British in Punjab, then re-exported globally. The multidirectional circulation of design and capital materialized in these two carpets was an expression of late nineteenth-century geopolitics and identity formation, built on previous centuries of similar negotiations between earlier empires in

**43** A. M. Dallas, *Report on the Punjab Exhibition 1881–82: Selections from the Records of the Government of the Punjab and its Dependencies,* n.s. no. xxii (Lahore: Punjab Government Secretariat Press, 1883), 59.

**44** London, Victoria and Albert Museum Archives, MA/2/1/1–3, "Mr. C. Purdon Clarke's visit to and purchases in India," inventory numbers 797 and 798.

**45** I am grateful to Gwenaelle Fellinger of the Louvre, and Avalon Fotheringham of the V&A for their help with the research on this previously undocumented carpet.

**46** Walter Benjamin, "Paris – Capital City of the Nineteenth Century," *Dissent Magazine* (September– October 1970); first published 1920.

**47** V&A Archives, MA/2/1/1–3.

the region, such as the Mughals and the Persian Safavid dynasty.

Jail carpets offer a record of British colonial power over the creativity and artistic traditions of Punjab, but also over Indian bodies. Jail carpets are part of the broader British organization of punishment and disciplined labor in South Asia, and have been read as a confrontational representation of the hegemony's coercion of both subaltern individuals and subaltern societies.48 Michel Foucault offered a framing for such discussions in his identification of the role of jail systems in the formation of both personal identity and the body.49 The Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London in 1886, where Purdon Clarke's Indian purchases were displayed, offered a stark example of this. The five and a half million people who visited the exhibition saw jail weavers themselves displayed alongside their products.50

**Fig. 5:** Machine-woven carpet, Templeton and Company, Glasgow, New Zealand wool and jute, ca. 1950. Author's photograph from "Templeton Presents Carpets of Distinction," Glasgow: Templeton and Co., 1952.

### **Repossessing "Oriental" Carpets in Punjab: The "Private" Industry, 1870–1947**

Jail carpets have been a focus in the historiography of carpets made in nineteenth-century India, written both during and since that period. However, alongside them, a less-studied independent commercial carpet weaving industry developed in the later

**48** This important topic in South Asian postcolonial thought is explored in, for example, Satadru Sen, *Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India* (Delhi: Primus Books, 2012); David Arnold, "The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology," in *Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Gupta* (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 148–84.

**49** Michel Foucault, *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,* trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), 135–95.

**50** Saloni Mathur, "Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886," *Cultural Anthropology*, vol. 15 no. 4 (November 2000): 492–524.

decades of the century. This was described by the British as "the private industry."51 The usage of the term "private" for the entire indigenous industry is an indicator of the degree of British identification with, and belief in their control of the Indian public space and the material culture that lay within it.

The center of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century independent carpet industry in Punjab was Amritsar.52 Amritsar was already a well-established trading center when the British East India Company annexed Punjab in 1849. Its connections with European and North American entrepreneurs, merchants, and dealers strengthened during the second half of the nineteenth century, giving its traders and producers insight into the tastes and requirements of European and North American consumers.53

In parallel the shawl-weaving industry of neighboring Kashmir came under pressure from a number of factors. British and French industries in replicas, and the economic impact of the Franco-Prussian war and the struggles between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, had by the late nineteenth century caused a collapse in demand for these elite objects across Europe and Asia.54 A severe famine in Kashmir in the 1880s led to the migration of shawl weavers to Punjab, in particular Amritsar, a traditional center for the trading of Kashmiri shawls.55 Facing a decline in the shawl market, weavers joined the "private' carpet industry. This Kashmiri diaspora brought into Amritsar an infusion of world-class production disciplines, and spinning, weaving, dyeing, and design skills.

Meanwhile, Amritsar was not subject to the full strength of the British imperial carpet system as Lahore was. Both Amritsar and Lahore had a jail workshop, but Lahore was also the location of the main British-founded museum and art school in Punjab.56 Carpets produced in Amritsar for the growing market for luxurious interiors in Europe and America were consequently less mediated by a British idea of what an oriental carpet should be.

However, the imposition of a British idea of an Indo-Persian carpet had consequences, albeit unintended, on the independent industry. Rather than encouraging Amritsar carpet makers toward British-authorized "traditions," I suggest that it instead loosened the bonds of identity between independent Punjabi weavers and their own Mughal and pre-Mughal styles of carpets. Once that bond was broken, energy was

**51** W. Coldstream, *Report on the Punjab Exhibition 1881–2,* 61.

**52** Latimer, *Monograph* (1907), 5–7.

**53** W. S Caine, *Picturesque India* (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1891), 158–60. Mumford*, Oriental Carpets* (1903), 251–65.

**54** Michelle Maskiell, "Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000", *Journal of World History*, vol. 13. No. 1, (Spring 2002): 27–65.

**55** Suhail Lone, "Famine in late nineteenth century Kashmir", *Proceedings of the Indian History Congress*, vol. 77 (2016): 450–460

**56** The Amritsar art school was founded in 1928 by the Sikh artist Gurdit Singh. The Lahore Mayo School of Art was founded by the British in 1875.

**Fig. 6:** Hand-knotted carpet, cotton, wool, silk, Amritsar, ca.1900.

released for a heterodox idea of what an oriental carpet might look like. Reimagined forms of carpets emerged in Amritsar as a consequence, which did not set out to express British ideological concerns, or to exemplify a static hierarchy of quality and tradition (**fig. 6**). The Amritsar carpet illustrated is very distinct from the Persian and Indo-Persian carpets promoted by the British, and from Mughal carpets. Its combination of large, simplified motifs and dense, long pile is a reversal of what is often found in accomplished West, Central, and South Asian carpets. There, small detailed motifs and short, fine pile permit high-definition, intricate designs.  This blurring is increased by the subduing of the palette. Instead of the complex combinations of shades of red, blue, and green associated in Europe and America with oriental carpets, the palette is narrow, muted and almost monochrome. What we perceive is a watery impression of an oriental carpet that does not insist on its centrality in the visual field, or compromise the overall Western interior scheme, in particular the need for furniture to sit on the carpets, and to break into the pattern.

In the face of a British institutional insistence on the traditional, the Amritsar industry introduced innovations in design, palette, and materials. However, the innovation which arguably had the most significance for the production of carpets in Punjab from 1880 onward was Amritsar's business model. Focused on producing carpets for the export market, and with a well-structured legal and financial system of contracts, the Amritsar industry drew together the capital and entrepreneurial skills of indigenous manufacturers, such as the Hutheesing family and Chamba Lal and Company, the skills and production disciplines of the self-managing community of Kashmiri shawl weavers, and North American intermediaries such as Lockwood de Forest (1850–1932), who gave access to the customers and capital of New York dealers and retailers including Louis Comfort Tiffany and W&J Sloane.57 By the turn of the nineteenth century, Amritsar was a vigorous industrial city, with a modern infrastructure of railways and telegraphs, and a thriving carpet export industry.58

The British establishment in India was interested in the "private" carpet industry as a sign of economic vitality in India, but disturbed by its divergence from the purity of tradition in crafts and carpets that the British had so energetically imagined and endorsed in Punjab and more broadly across British India.59 The resistance mounted by contemporaneous European and North American commentators, connoisseurs, curators, and collectors to Amritsar carpets was, however, more intense. They dis-

**57** For a case study of the carpet collaboration in Amritsar and Ahmadebad between Lockwood de Forest (1850–1932) and the Hutheesing family, see Roberta Mayer, *Lockwood de Forest: Furnishing the Gilded Age with a Passion for India* (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). For the collaboration in Amritsar between Shaikh Gulam Hussun and W&J Sloane, see *The Story of Sloane's* (New York: W&J Sloane, 1950).

**58** For a contemporaneous description of the difference between the cities of Lahore and Amritsar and rural India see Rudyard Kipling, *Kim* (London: Penguin, 1989), 74–89; first published 1901. **59** McGowan, "All that is rare," 263–86; McGowan, "Convict Carpets," 391–416.

missed Amritsar carpets as "purely commercial products" produced for export, which abandoned the traditional practices and techniques in which Western connoisseurs were invested.60 There was particular criticism of the factory-like, and indeed, jaillike disciplines used in Amritsar. These commentators disregarded the evidence that Indian carpet making had taken place in factories rather than rural workshops and homes since the Mughal invasion,61 and that many of the production disciplines were adopted from traditional Kashmiri shawl making practices.62

In the Western connoisseurial response to Amritsar carpets, there was a blurring of objections to methods of production, political and economic unease, and aesthetic anxiety, which continues to be characteristic of European and North American responses to oriental carpets. Despite this ideological ferment, the new aesthetic was commercially successful among consumers, particularly in America, where the ideological aspects of the taste authorized by the British possibly had less resonance. Meanwhile, time has done its work and Amritsar rugs are now valued as antiques of high aesthetic and sensual appeal, commanding high prices. The carpet in figure 6 was for sale in 2017 for \$150,000, at a time when an attractive late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century nomadic or village carpet could be bought for around \$3,000.63

The Amritsar carpet industry offers an example of a colonial territory that repossessed its own tradition from the taste precepts of the colonizer, and reworked that tradition to take independent advantage of the commercial opportunity arising from globalizing markets. The attraction of its carpets as antiques in the modern international market for art and antiquities obscures the ideological difficulties they raised at the time of their production. The Amritsar story challenges both the orientalist and postcolonial assumption that something is being done to the East by the West, and linear and binary models of transfer and influence.

#### **Carpets and the New Nation: Pakistan from 1947**

When India gained its independence from Britain in 1947 and a separate Muslim state of Pakistan was established, Punjab was partitioned between the two new states. As a result, the production locations of the Lahore jail carpet and the Amritsar carpet were

**60** Mumford, *Oriental Carpets*, 251–59: George Birdwood, *Industrial Arts of India* (1880), (Calcutta: 1992), 285–300: Vincent Robinson, "Indian Carpets," *Oriental Carpets: The Catalogue of the 1891 Exhibition at the Handels-Museum, Vienna*.

**61** Roy, *Traditional Industry*, 199.

**62** For a description of Dr. Leithner's exhibit of the Kashmiri shawl-weaving process, see *Report on the Punjab Exhibition 1881º2,* 31.

**63** See "Amritsar Rugs," DorisLeslieBlau.com, accessed June 22, 2021, dorisleslieblau.com/amritsar-indian-rugs.

separated by a national border and by religion. Despite being only thirty miles apart, from 1947 Muslim Lahore was in Pakistan, Sikh Amritsar in India (**fig. 7**).

Carpet making in Indian jails had ceased by 1930, in the face of international economic depression and increasing consumer ambivalence about the circumstances of production. The independent carpet weaving industry of Amritsar was still in operation in 1947, although smaller than at its peak in the 1920s. Most carpet weavers in Amritsar were Muslim, and moved at partition to Pakistan.64 The Pakistani handmade carpet industry inherited the skills and production methods of the Amritsar industry, its outward focus on export markets, and its readiness to meet consumer appetites.65 The Pakistani industry also adopted its readiness to transgress orthodox expectations of design, reinventing pattern structures, motifs, and palettes (**fig. 8**). Meanwhile, a major industry in copies and versions of well-known Eurasian carpet styles, and of particular famous carpets, developed in Pakistan (**fig. 9**).

As a consequence, Pakistani carpets have also inherited Amritsar's problematic relationship with the European and North American hierarchy of oriental carpets, which has globalized alongside the globalization of the market for art and antiquities.66 Pakistan's reinventions and versions of oriental carpets have reactivated the

**64** Feliccia Yacopino, *Threadlines Pakistan* (Karachi: Ministry of Industries, Government of Pakistan in concurrence with the United Nations development Programme, 1977).

**65** *Handmade Carpet Manufacturing* (Karachi: State Bank of Pakistan, 2015).

**66** The new museums of Islamic art in the Gulf States have taken advice on their collections from Western carpet specialists, for example.

**Fig. 8:** Carpet, wool, and cotton, Pakistan, 2017.

**Fig. 9:** Left: handmade "Bokhara" carpet, Pakistan, New Zealand wool, contemporary 1.8 × 1.2 m, Walmart Online Store, US. Right: similar carpet, John Lewis Online, UK.

anxieties about tradition, authenticity, and export wares at the core of the nineteenth-century rejection of change in oriental carpets, and the suspicion of copies which has been part of the debate on modernity from the mid-nineteenth century onward.67 The carpets of postcolonial Pakistan are popular with consumers, but are as controversial with the now-global connoisseurial community as those of colonial Amritsar were in the late nineteenth century.68 They demonstrate the level of anxiety that is still present when a geography of indigenous production reclaims its material culture from the ideology of the hegemony.

However, the carpet industry is fundamental to Pakistan's economy and identity. On their present-day websites, both the Lahore Carpet Company and the Multan Handmade Carpet Company claim that they were established in 1947, the year of Pakistani independence.69 The PAK Carpet Company makes a subtly different claim, that it became the home for the émigré weavers of Amritsar.70 These three modern carpet-making companies see their firms, weaving, and trade as part of the origin story of their nation. Meanwhile, handwoven pile carpets, while not the biggest industry in Pakistan, make an important contribution to Pakistani exports. More than 90% of production is exported, and Pakistan is one of the major exporters of oriental carpets in the world.71 A circulation of only thirty miles between Lahore and Amritsar established oriental carpets as agents in the creation of both the identity and the economy of the new Pakistani state.

#### **Conclusion**

I have argued that the visual plane, materials, and meaning of an oriental carpet have been contested since the beginning of the nineteenth century by interest groups inside and outside the geographies of indigenous production. In particular, I have described the degree to which the assessment of the quality of oriental carpets and their design has been defined by Europe and North America in this period, and has

**67** Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," *Illuminations*, trans. Harry Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–45; first published 1936. For craft revivalists and copying see Adamson, *The Invention of Craft*, 141–64, 191–98.

**68** For example, the leading international periodical on oriental carpets, *Hali*, does not cover modern Pakistani export production.

**69** See Lahorecarpet.com, and Multan Oriental Hand Made Carpet Company Facebook page, accessed June 22, 2021, https://facebook.com/MOHMC.

**70** See Pakpersianrugs.co.uk/oriental-persian-rug-articles.

**71** Trade Development Authority of Pakistan, "Carpet Industry" (2006), accessed June 22, 2021, tdap. gov.pk/tdap-statistics.php; *Pakistan Economic Survey* (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan Finance Division Economic Advisors Wing, 1977), 55.

been underpinned by changing European and North American tastes, sensibilities, and hegemonic ideologies.

However, the analysis here of the carpets of Punjab and Pakistan shows how these same international markets and geopolitics have offered an opportunity to carpet makers and traders in the countries of indigenous production to reinvent their own traditions of making and design, and to reclaim agency in the definition of what constitutes an oriental carpet. I have argued that the repossession and reinvention of oriental carpets in Punjab was a transfer of agency from hegemonic powers to local producers, and that this expression of agency was a transgression of power relations in the eyes of the colonizers. The consequence of this was that the carpets themselves were regarded as transgressive by the arbiters of taste in Europe and America, irrespective of their intrinsic design, materials, and cultural qualities. The carpets of Punjab and Pakistan illustrate how political, social, economic, and cultural power works to modify the material culture of those it dominates, and the agency of indigenous makers in resisting that power.

#### Aziza Gril-Mariotte **The Art of Printed Textiles**

Selecting Motifs in the Eighteenth Century

In France, unlike in Switzerland, Holland, and England, printing on fabrics using engraved wood blocks, known as *indiennage*, only became a new branch of the textile industry after 1759, when the ban on indiennes was lifted. The import of indiennes, which were cotton fabrics ornamented by bright-colored motifs obtained through the use of mordant, a chemical compound that fixed the dye onto fabric fibers, had angered manufacturers of linen, wool, and silk-based fabrics. King Louis XIV, who was eager to protect the national textile industry and to curb imports, imposed a total ban in 1686, applying not only to imports (with the exception of those of the East India Company, destined to be reexported to the colonies), but also to manufacturing in printing workshops.

After 1759, the fabric printing industry began growing thanks to the manufacturers that adapted techniques to fix dyes onto cotton fabrics using mordants and printed numerous motifs from the Western language, borrowed from the manufactured arts.1 During the second half of the eighteenth century, painted fabrics remained perceived as dependent on fabrics imported from the Indies. While in technical terms, European *indiennage* did draw on processes used in the Indies, in artistic terms manufacturers sought to appeal to a broad clientele by making pieces that were not limited to the imported models that had already been tailored to European tastes for the trading companies.2 While there is no denying the importance of stylistic borrowings from imported pieces, the study of the motifs created in the early years of French *indiennage* highlights a range of other borrowings, from textiles, decorative arts (porcelain and marquetry furniture), as well as nature. The prints produced by French manufacturers from the 1760s to 1780s call for revisiting the eighteenth-century output of indiennes. By comparing these products with other contemporary items, the question of the origin of the motifs can be addressed in terms of influence, borrowings, and circulation. A history of the mobility of forms between printing centers as well as

**1** Aziza Gril-Mariotte, "Aux sources de la création: Modèles, emprunts et circulation des formes occidentales dans les toiles peintes de Neuchâtel au XVIIIe siècle," in *Made in Neuchâtel: Deux siècles d'indiennes*, ed. Lisa Laurenti (Paris: Somogy éditions d'art, 2018), 86–97.

**2** Agnès Geijer, "Some Evidence of Indo-European Cotton Trade in Pre-Mughal Times," *Journal of Indian Textile History*, no. 1 (1955, reissued in 1996): 34–39. Katharine Brett, "An English Source of Indian Chintz Design," *Journal of Indian Textile History*, no. 1 (1955, reissued in 1996): 40–3, "A French Source of Indian Chintz Design," *Journal of Indian Textile History*, no. 2 (1956, reissued in 1996): 43–52. Veronica Murphy, "Europeans and the Textile Trade," in *Arts of India, 155–171*, ed. Johny Guy and Deborah Swallow (London: Victoria & Albert Museum/Mopin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1990), 153–72.

between different textiles—most notably silk—or manufactured arts, may emerge in the process.

In the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, the term "painted textiles" was commonly used by manufacturers, traders, consumers, and notaries alike to refer to all cotton and linen-based fabrics that were printed with motifs. This was due to the manufacturers' need for a generic term that alluded neither to a technique, like "printing," or to a geographical origin, like "indienne." The need to use a word other than "indienne" was also reflected in the ornamental vocabulary developed by designers when production was allowed in the kingdom in 1759. In France, as in Switzerland, Holland, and England, the manufactures and their workers (designers and engravers) used patterns that circulated in books and drew inspiration from other manufactured products. Designers in painted textile manufacturers had varied sources at their disposal, as the enthusiasm for decoration spurred the diffusion of numerous pattern books. Motifs never circulated in Europe and between different productions to such an extent, reflecting the wide array of decorative possibilities explored by ornamentalists.

A new artistic era dawned as the ban on indiennes ended, characterized by an effort to draw, at least in part, on new sources of inspiration, to appeal to other customers who were not accustomed to the foreign motifs of the genuine indiennes. In Marseille, where the franchise granted to the harbor gave it an exemption from the ban, which favored the opening of indienne factories, the few preserved samples dating back to the 1730s show that their ornamental language was still dependent on motifs from imported fabrics.3 Starting in 1759, factories proliferated throughout the kingdom—though some were rather short-lived. The manufactory founded in Jouyen-Josas by Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, a craftsman of German descent, would go on to be the largest European one in the early nineteenth century. Yet, during the first decade of French *indiennage*, between the 1760s to the 1780s, its output was not distinguishable from that of most other factories. Many books from that manufactory have been preserved; they give a glimpse into the diversity and complexity of forms, revealing modes of circulation and the appropriation of some motifs. The collections at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) contain several albums that showcase the artistic trends of that time. Among them, there is an exceptional document: the 1766 factory register, which comprises 359 prints made on paper to check the engraving on the blocks and the quality of the design during the year, and is one of the few not to have been subsequently reworked.4 Manufacturers rou-

**3** *Manuscrit du duc de Richelieu,* 1736, vol. 1, folios no. 28 and 29. Bnf, Cabinet des Estampes, cote LH 45.

**4** Paris, musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766." This research is dedicated to Jean-Paul Leclercq (1947–2019) a former curator at the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, who pointed out this register to me and encouraged me to work on these prints.

tinely collected these paper prints in albums on a yearly basis: "One must carefully preserve books of drawings so that they may serve to observe the progress or degeneration of taste," Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf said.5

These sketch designs were all printed on fabric, as evidenced by the details provided near each print, indicating the number of pieces and the width of the fabrics. However, no printed version has been found, with the exception of a chinoiserie drawing from a recovered quilt fragment.6 These prints illustrate the early days of *indiennage* in France and expand our knowledge of motifs that were ordinary, as they were printed with few colors and consumed to an extent that did not make it possible to preserve them.

The analysis of the 1766 factory book gives us a window into the creative processes involved in the annual production of a painted fabric manufactory in the early stage of this industry's development in France. These paper prints present the variety of methods elaborated by designers and engravers to create a textile collection that paid heed to decorative fashions and made the most of the engraving process. The book showcases the different kinds of motifs printed over the course of a year for furniture or clothing. Categories of ornaments belonging to the textile or decorative arts emerge. Among these 359 prints, two bodies stand out: first, the designs based on sources openly identified by the manufacturers—motifs of Indian inspiration, silk textiles or motifs drawn from nature—and compositions that relied on the distinctive processes of woodblock engraving. The study of these two broad categories gives us an updated picture of the idea of creation in *indiennage*, a field in which innovation remained dependent on economic constraints. The manufacturers worked for a broad spectrum of customers, ranging from the court (for the furnishings of rooms in royal residences) to artisans (for clothes). As they disseminated motifs that were already widespread on other supports, they contributed to trends and fashions and ensured the success of their products.

**5** Archives nationales du Monde du Travail (ANMT), 2003 059 1 (Fonds Oberkampf: anciennement 41AQ), "Actes de société, papiers personnels d'Oberkampf 1763–1811," dossier no. 83: "Opinion d'Oberkampf, fondateur des Manufactures de Jouy et d'Essonnes sur leur prospérité et leur conservation." **6** The print and quilt fragment in question, from the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, were studied in Aziza Gril-Mariotte, *Les toiles de Jouy: histoire d'un art décoratif, 1760–1821* (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 140.

### **Creations in an Annual Collection in the Early Days of***Indiennage*

The book inventories all the creations made during the year 1766 at the Oberkampf manufactory of Jouy-en-Josas; each paper print comes with notes that provide indications on the width of fabrics and the number of colors to print. The paper prints give us a glimpse into the creative process, the sources of inspiration and the variations conceived by engravers under the helm of designer Louis Rordorf, who was hired in Zurich in 1764 to lead the creative workshop.7 The book features 359 designs that correspond to the production of a printing campaign spanning spring through fall.8 The analysis of the categories of motifs included shows that the designers relied on varied sources of inspiration. These documents confirm that patterns circulated first between contemporary manufactured productions, and that faraway influences came second. For instance, the imaginary China-inspired motifs known as chinoiseries, although they are prominently represented in early eighteenth-century textile collections, amount to only 1.4% of all prints for that year. The book reveals that as far as the reality of production in an indienne manufacture of the 1760s went, exotic motifs remained in the minority. This is due to the elitist consumption of indiennes imported from India and Persia, which sold for much higher prices than the fabrics printed in France, where printing techniques were not yet mastered well enough to achieve such bright and abundant colors as those featured on the large coverings ornamented with trees of life. The early French indienne fabrics were purchased by customers who did not have sufficient resources to procure the genuine articles, as imports were heavily taxed and retail prices were geared toward the wealthy. Only by the late 1770s were the largest French manufacturers able to print large motifs inspired by or borrowed from Indian designs, circulating luxury prints reserved for the consumers that enjoyed furnishing their rooms and wearing clothes with motifs inspired by foreign sources. These French imitations, although expensive, remained far more affordable than the imports.9

**7** According to colorist Moll from the Coye manufactory, cited by Alain Dewerpe and Yves Gaulupeau, *La fabrique des prolétaires: Les ouvriers de la manufacture d'Oberkampf à Jouy-en-Josas, 1760–1815* (Paris: Presses de l'École Normale Supérieure, 1990), 42.

**8** ANMT, 2003 059 7: "Considération d'Oberkampf sur le dessin et la mode" (1813).

**9** In 1770, the upholsterer Jean-François Bimont gave an example of the variations of prices per ell, between 144 livres (pounds) for "the beautiful Persian" (a name that indicated an import), 4 to 6 livres for "the Indian, the beautiful" and between 3 livres and 55 florins for the "ordinary Indian": Jean-François Bimont, *Principes de l'art du tapissier, ouvrage utile aux gens de la profession et à ceux qui les emplient* (Paris, 1770), 100–01.

This table presents generic types of motifs. Some could be categorized differently: for instance, here, small, stylized flowers are in the geometric pattern category, whereas flower stripes or foliage are considered floral motifs. Despite the somewhat arbitrary nature of this classification, it shows that in its early days, *indiennage* relied on the imitation or copy of fabrics imported from India or Persia only to a very limited extent. "Indian motifs" did exist but made up only 16% of the total output. Flower foliage motifs inspired by the East were a characteristic category of *indiennage*, but remained fairly seldom found at that point, likely because imports from India were more prized by consumers, but also because they were more difficult to imitate. This category also includes smaller motifs corresponding to the forms of *boteh*, flower patterns found in the Mughal prints of the Gujarat region copied by designers during that year.

These classifications of printed designs attest to the ability of indienne makers to embrace a variety of forms and to transpose them using a technique that permits a wide array of variations of woodblock printing.

#### **When Fabrics Inspire Indienne Makers**

"Silk pieces have been of great assistance and could also be useful in the future ... The natural history of plants can give us admirable things."10 As he cited these sources of inspiration, Oberkampf defined a widespread method for creating new motifs, which consisted of borrowing patterns from other domains. These included, for instance, floral motifs taken from pattern books: one print has a rose branch

**10** ANMT, 2003 059 1, "Opinion d'Oberkampf, fondateur des Manufactures de Jouy et d'Essonnes sur leur prospérité et leur conservation."

**Fig.1:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, page 285.

whose identical form can be found in a book of flower patterns.11 Other motifs were borrowed from textile products that relied on weaving techniques, such as silk items. Designers transposed the characteristic ornaments of Genoa velvet to make printed versions where stylized flower motifs were arranged in pomegranate shapes found in silk fabrics (**fig. 1**). In this case, the pattern that initially stemmed from a particular technique (weaving) and raw material (silk yarn) became a solid, flat pattern, but one whose debt to the original was evident. Was the printed version a cheaper imitation, as wallpapers later were, or did the designers take an existing pattern to create a new *indiennage* motif? We lack archives on the reception of the pomegranate prints

**11** *Nouveau livre de roses* d'après Mr Jacques, peintre du roi en la manufacture des Gobelins, gravées par P. F. Tardieu (Paris, chez J. F. Chéreau, vers 1771) pl. 3 and 5. Bibliothèque de l'INHA, collection J. Doucet, NUM FOL EST 527.

**Fig. 2:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 49, 91, 265.

characteristic of Genoa velvet to know how consumers perceived this motif. However, the transposition of designs obtained through weaving into prints cannot be genuine imitations of silk pieces: their visual appearance and sensation to touch make them designs that evoke luxurious fabrics as opposed to "fake" silk pieces.

Replicas of silk items were a fairly prominent part of the decorative language of these designers in 1766. Items whose characteristics were obtained through weaving, particularly regarding the density of fabrics and velvet, were reproduced in solid form using woodblock printing, resulting in original creations whose origins the consumer was not always able to perceive. The designers transposed the characteristics of silk druggets (a fine fabric extensively used for men's costumes, sometimes mixed with other cotton or wool fibers whose weaving produced small motifs) with floret motifs, small chiseled velvet parts, to propose new printed compositions whose designs were already extensively used in men's clothing. The consumer could recognize formal analogies with these common, widespread silk items, but the prints were not credible imitations of genuine silk pieces (**fig. 2**). Some prints featured floret designs on a vermiculated background, whose motifs were borrowed from the friezed velvets with miniature ornaments that were in fashion in the 1750s. Once the composition was printed on fabric, the consumer would not perceive the transposition of effects obtained through weaving in these motifs (**fig. 3**).

On the other hand, when designer transposed forms borrowed from lace ribbons, which had been common in silk pieces since the 1730s, the heritage of silk appears to have been openly acknowledged (**fig. 4**). There are many examples displaying such motifs whose references were explicit for consumers. The same phenomenon was visible in the meanders that were widespread in the brocaded lampases of the Lyon silk factories (**fig. 5**). Designers also reproduced the winding layouts that accompanied branches in blossom or stripped patterns inspired by silk models. These compositions had become very common decorative formulas for a variety of fabrics. *Indi-*

**Fig. 3:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 62, 266.

**Fig. 4:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 161, 200.

**Fig. 5:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 187, 264.

*ennage* thus contributed to the spread of fashions by reproducing ornaments that characterized textile art.

In the 1766 factory books, the designs that were reminiscent of silk items were just as prominent as vegetal motifs and geometric shapes. The silk patterns constituted an original corpus that shows how designers used forms found in weaving to devise a variety of designs with versatile compositions, even though as they were transposed in the process of woodblock printing the patterns that characterized brocades or velvet pieces became flat motifs. In other cases, the designers pointed to the influence of silk by reproducing spiral lace patterns and meandering effects, striving to lend a sense of thickness, of volume to their motifs. In brocaded silk fabrics, designers appear to have found an inexhaustible wellspring that reflects a process of explicit circulation and appropriation since this derivation was openly acknowledged, although they did not set out to produce genuine copies. Designers chose very common silk patterns; they hoped to appeal to consumers by printing familiar motifs. These prints were more affordable but also lighter, and could serve as fabrics for summer clothes, particularly men's vests.

The same process applied to patterns drawn from nature. The effort on the naturalism of flowers also entailed a reference to the model, between, first, the miniaturization of flowers resulting in geometrical motifs with one or two colors, and second, bouquets or branches of flowers printed in several colors, producing a gradation and lending volume to the motifs. This question of the transposition, the adaptation, and the reuse of motifs was inherent in textile production, as designers had to come up with new creations constantly.

#### **Varying and Combining Motifs to Update Creations**

Other creative processes used an implicit method that reflected the resources employed by manufacturers to churn out updated motifs by proposing variations and offshoots. The easiest solution to implement was to print the same design on different backgrounds or at different scales. Oberkampf described how to make the most of a successful design in this manner:

"When one has a good design, an advantageous resource is to do it in different genres; if we start from a white background we do it on a sandy background or on other decorated backgrounds or color backgrounds; if, conversely, we start from a color background, we do it on a white or sandy background. Another way that I have always found successful is when one has a popular design, to do it in smaller and bigger versions; the advantage of this if that one can use students that one trains for this purpose or those among the designers who do not have a highly creative mind."12

Designers and engravers developed many other processes to introduce new designs based on the same decorative scheme or type of motif. A genuine semiology of textile is at work in the decorative typologies developed by designers, from the general layout of the design to the treatment of the background. The same layout could be adapted to fit very different motifs; a very common one was the diamond, obtained using varied shapes. This arrangement relied on the intertwining of lines: in the print on p. 40, the line is formed by a series of dots whose combination creates a diamond, in the middle of which a stylized floret is placed. This method was then applied to different dots and lines (**fig. 6**). Designers reproduced a process with slight variations, resulting in designs that looked similar without being identical. Their differences could then be accentuated using dye colors; plays with color are not always visible in the prints, but annotations give a sense of the final result. Some examples show how the same decoration—winding lines—and a diamond composition can result in two distinct designs: one has winding, picot-patterned stripes laid out in latticework form on a colored background; the other features a simple winding line crossed with another hatched line in a checked pattern obtained through color (**fig. 7**).

Decorative possibilities appeared virtually endless. This was an implicit practice as these processes were taught neither in design schools nor in manufactory workshops. They were the result of an economic necessity, which was to quickly produce

**12** ANMT (see note 5).

**Fig. 6:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 40, 78, 138.

**Fig. 7:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 6, 81.

**Fig. 8:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 15, 71, 89.

varied motifs that fit decorative fashions. For instance, the so-called Greek or Etruscan style that became popular when the cities of Herculaneum and Pompei were uncovered appeared in Versailles in the 1760s, it was only after it proliferated in the form of geometric motifs that makers of indiennes and wallpapers embraced these ornaments. *Indiennage*, like any industrial production, disseminated forms that were already widespread in the other manufacturing arts. In similar fashion, the diamond patterns used by Parisian cabinetmakers to decorate wood veneer, brass or porcelain furniture came to inspire engravers and designers in painted fabric manufactories. This circulation of decorative trends and the borrowings from the decorative arts, as with the Greek meander ornaments, reflected the need to fit dominant tastes in order to appeal to consumers. Painted textile manufactures were rarely places of artistic innovation, as their output was geared toward a broad clientele, not an elite one that craved innovation. Still, the acceleration of fashion forced manufacturers to be ever more creative and to come up with new motifs every year.

The book includes several compositions that are reminiscent of the marquetry ornaments that were often found on furniture in those days (**fig. 8**). One print even has a design that evokes a herringbone parquet floor with added leaf motifs. These herringbone patterns evoked decorative effects obtained through weaving, but in this example the influence of woodworking dominates. The circulation of decorations between productions that varied quite widely, as in the case of the textile and cabinetmaking industries, was probably due to the existence of common sources, of pattern books that circulated in workshops, and more broadly to the need to interpret fashionable forms.

Based on these prints, the actual practices of designers can be retraced. Their goal was to produce as many designs as possible using as few resources as possible. *Indiennage* remained an industrial production that depended on tastes. Manu-

**Fig. 9:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 103, 230.

facturers appropriated patterns that had become widely fashionable to make sure their output was profitable. The designers churned out compositions by relying on reuse effects that suggested that the same block or the same motif could be combined with others. The prints on page 103 and page 230, for instance, partly share the same design; or rather, the design on page 103 was combined with foliage in blossom to produce a new composition (**fig. 9**). In this case, the two designs were partly printed on the same carved woodblocks; printing a new, completely different design while saving on carving another block was clearly beneficial to the manufacturer. In the context of industrial production, the two compositions were printed together; part of the print would simply undergo one more run on the block, provided the composition of the mordant that fixed the dye color was identical; if not, this had to happen later, after the block was washed.

Another process consisted in making two different designs using the same blocks by printing different colors (**fig. 10**). The first design (p. 92) was obtained by printing two boards in the same color; annotations indicated that it was printed in two monochrome versions, red or blue. The same design was printed (p. 96) in two colors, with the black outlines complemented by red *rentrures*—the secondary blocks used to color the motifs. Comparison of the two prints show that same blocks were used to print two different compositions: for the first (p. 92) the two blocks printed the same color, whereas the second (p. 96) displays black outlines and a red filling—annotations mention that printing was done in two colors. It is, however, uncertain whether

**Fig. 10:** Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, BAD en.12930, cote AA43 "livre de fabrique année 1766," gouache on paper printed on a wooden board, from left to right: pages 92, 96.

the two versions were actually manufactured or if they remained trial runs, since prints were made to assess the quality of the engraving, but also the rendering of the design before moving on to the manufacturing process. Generally, print books feature indications as to the number of printed pieces and their date of fabrication, such as "March 4 7/8 pieces 21 April 6 7/8 pieces 24 May 1 7/8 piece." Yet, next to the two prints on pages 92 and 96, there are no details on the quantities of manufactured ells, which suggests that none of the two versions were issued in 1766.

Another way to make the engraving process profitable was to print identical motifs on different backgrounds, and in some cases in several colors. Once printed, the fabrics looked like two different compositions even though the same blocks were used to manufacture them. These were widespread processes in the textile industry, and printing techniques facilitated their implementation. The preliminary gouache sketches made in the designers' workshops of manufacturers often featured different backgrounds for the same composition, either to test the visual effect, or to print a design that would be sold to consumers on several types of backgrounds. This work on backgrounds could be entrusted to designers in training who reproduced trendy motifs: picot-patterned, vermiculated, with branches or florets. These gouache backgrounds on paper were then cut and arranged around the main composition. The manufacturer could then choose which one to pass on to the engraver that would make the woodblock used to print the background. As the main and secondary motifs forming the background of the fabric were dissociated, the printer's work was made more complex: they would have to superimpose several blocks. However, these blocks could also be used for other combinations of motifs. Assembling blocks was delicate work, requiring close collaboration between engravers and printers. To Oberkampf, a successful manufacturing process relied on perfect coordination between engraver, colorist and printer. After drawing, "the most essential thing to know for anyone managing a manufactory" was engraving, and then came "the knowledge of colors."13

Between the sources of inspiration recognized by the manufacturers and the methods devised to offer many designs based on identical or similar motifs, the possibilities offered by printing techniques seemed endless. The modes of creation and their variations reflected the need to propose multiple new products every year. The prints made during 1766 can be read at several levels: the general layout of the design, the motifs themselves, and the treatment of the backgrounds. The options examined here reveal processes developed by designers and engravers in painted textile manufacturers for woodblock printing. Designers faced the same constraints everywhere, having to produce large numbers of designs that could be reused and reproduced with variations, and readily engraved. The creative logics that were expressed in this endeavor came from recommended methods, particularly relative to the play with the scales or the treatment of backgrounds, but in most cases they were direct expressions of the models used by designers to create original designs—not of a practice defined in manufacturers' workshops. The early French *indiennage* prints circulated among a bourgeois clientele that appreciated their fashionable, regularly updated motifs and the solidity of their fabrics. Depending on the motif, uses in furniture or clothing can be posited, but these hypotheses are sometimes called into question. It has happened, for instance, that a fragment of bedspread whose flower motifs could just as well have been used for a dress. Likewise, the ornaments borrowed from Genoa velvet items were likely used for bedroom furnishing at much lower prices than genuine velvet, but they too could also have been on clothes. Defining uses and consumers is bound to be a hypothetical exercise, as vestiges of these prints are extremely rare.

The designers' sources of inspiration mainly came from samples from silk manufacturers and other French, English, or Indian painted textiles, but also from books of engravings, marquetry forms, porcelain ornaments, etc. *Indiennage* reflected and depended upon the creativity of the decorative arts, giving us a glimpse of a history of a taste that was less celebrated than the manufactured objects delivered to Versailles, but a better reflection of people's everyday lives in the eighteenth century. The example of painted textile manufactures illustrates the rise of an industry that

**13** ANMT, 2003 059 4, "Lettre d'Oberkampf à Samuel Widmer, October 2, 1786."

heralded the industrialization of the production of everyday objects in the nineteenth century, with two production systems coexisting side by side: on the one hand, luxury production characterized by unique models and limited editions, and on the other, industrial production disseminating decorative fashions, before eclecticism turned historical models into a decorative paradigm of sorts. Everyday objects, fashion, and interior decorating items experienced a tremendous boom, making practices that were previously the preserve of the elites accessible to a broad clientele. By the second half of the eighteenth century already, *indiennage* exemplified this expansion of the consumer base, offering colored fabrics featuring trendy motifs for moderate prices.

### Chonja Lee **Chintzes as Printed Matter and Their Entanglement within the Transatlantic Slave Trade around 1800**

The story of chintzes, woodblock printed, painted, stained, or glazed calico textiles, is one of global success and goes on until today in the form of highly demanded printed cotton textiles. Historians have emphasized the circulation of printed cottons between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic space and their entanglement in complex transnational narratives, especially from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.1 Besides looking at the chintzes from an economic historical perspective it is also fruitful to think about these fabrics from a media historical perspective and combine colonial, art, and consumption history to understand the circulation of fabrics and their motifs. The market of printed cotton fabrics was highly segmented with different products for various countries, regions, consumer classes, and purposes. The technique of impression was key in this production; the printing procedure was relatively cheap, quick, and thus predestined for a wide spreading and fast cultural appropriation. Chintzes are, as this article intends to show with predominantly Swiss examples, related to printed matter, like books. This peculiar fabric stands in opposition to the paradigm of textility, and in its role as one of the main exchange commodities against enslaved humans it became a media of oppression.2 Examining the textile material culture of slavery sheds light on European producers and African consumers alike.3

**1** See, for example, Sarah Fee, ed., *Cloth that Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian chintz*, (Toronto/New Haven: Royal Ontario Museum, Yale University Press, 2019); Sven Beckert, *Empire of Cotton: A Global History* (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Giorgio Riello, *Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Amelia Peck, ed., *Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade 1500–1800*, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013); Beverly Lemire, *Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

**2** First thoughts in this direction have been presented in the conference *Produire du nouveau ? Arts – Techniques – Sciences en Europe (1400–1900)* in Geneva in 2017 and will be published in its conference proceedings.

**3** On how local particularities of African consumer tastes shaped the textile trade, see Pedro Machado, *Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750*–*1850* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120–167; Kazuo Kobayashi, *Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa: African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850* (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2019), 10; Carolyn Keyes, "West African Textiles. 1500–1800," in *Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand*, ed. Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 251–61.

#### **A Textile as Printed Matter**

Although theories of the textile have become popular in the last years, a textile, media, or image theory of chintzes is a lacuna. This has to do with the specificities of this kind of printed or painted fabric, which stands in opposition to the paradigm of textility social anthropologist Tim Ingold has described. The textile is for him the example for a processual making tangible in the final product: weaving, the slicing and binding of fibrous material, hence becomes the counterexample of hylomorphism.4 The chintz's production is precisely the latter, the imposition of form and imprint or painting of images on a pliant substance. Compared to other textile technologies like weaving, knitting, or embroidering, material and making disappears in chintzes behind a surface of patterns. It is not the textile medium that constitutes intrinsically the colors and designs of the chintz, therefore they are rather independent applications.5 The result is an ontological tension: chintzes are textiles, but their images nevertheless do not necessarily feature textile qualities.6 We can see this for example in the floral design of an apron, a rare surviving piece in Switzerland of Indian-produced chintz, probably from the Coromandel Coast, produced for the European market (**fig. 1**).7 Cotton fabrics were not only covered by mostly colorful patterns like the aforementioned case, but some chintzes also experienced a specific waxy finishing treatment: under the pressure of a polishing agate stone, threads and color pigments were pressed together with additives such as starch, fish glue, or wax until they formed a shiny surface. In the case of the so-called chimney sweep caraco jacket, this leather-looking skin is so smooth and darkly glossy that it is reminiscent of the aesthetics of lacquer work while the cotton's material qualities, like fluidity and semitransparency, disappear altogether the textile becomes through the process of reinforced impression a carcass like shell.8 However, the eighteenth century was still one of learning, with technical flaws in European production, and Indian fabrics were especially unsurpassed in their shininess.9

**4** See Tim Ingold, "The Textility of Making," *Cambridge Journal of Economics* 34, no. 1 (2010): 91–102, here 92.

**5** Certainly, the patterns are transferred onto the fabric using sometimes sophisticated dyes, mordant, and resist-dye techniques, but they are nevertheless not constituted through the woven threads. **6** "Textile" designates generally a thing, a material, or a feature. See Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert, "Editorial," *Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung* (Schwerpunkt Medienanthropologie) 4, no. 1 (2013): 5–9, here 5.

**7** See Claudia Ravazzolo, "An Apron's Tale: Innovative Colours and Fashionable Dress between India and the Swiss Cantons," in *Cotton in Context: Manufacturing, Marketing, and Consumption of Early Modern Textiles in the German-speaking World (1500–1900)*, ed. Kim Siebenhüner, John Jordan, and Gabi Schopf (Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2019), 171–94.

**8** See Noémie Etienne and Chonja Lee, "Lüster, Lack und Liotard: Techniken und Texturen zwischen Asien und Europa," *Kunst + Architektur in der Schweiz,* no. 1 (2018): 4–11.

**9** See Kim Siebenhüner, "Zwischen Imitation und Innovation: Die schweizerische Indienne-Industrie im 18. Jahrhundert," *WerkstattGeschichte 74: Produktive Imitationen* (Essen: Klartext, 2018): 7–27.

**Fig. 1:** Woman's apron worn in Basel, first half of the eighteenth century, unidentified artist(s), painted Indian cotton chintz, 113 × 159.5 cm. Basel Historical Museum, Basel, formerly in the possession of the Falkner-Geymüller family.

Denis Diderot's *Encyclopédie* (1765) defined the *toiles peintes* as "European made imitations10 of *indiennes*";11 the focus in the early years of the European chintz production was indeed on the substitution and imitation of chintzes of Indian origin.12

**10** The term of imitation should not be misunderstood in the sense of a twentieth-century mass production of cheap consumer ware imitating luxury products. See Maxine Berg, "New Commodities, Luxuries and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-century England," in *Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850*, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 63–85, here 81.

**11** Pierre Augustin de Boissier de Sauvages, *Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers*, vol. 16 (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche & Cie, 1765), 374–379. The differentiation between *indiennes* and *toiles peintes*, was less common within Switzerland, where the terms were used as synonyms. See John Jordan and Gabi Schopf, "Fictive Descriptions? Words, Textiles, and Inventories in Early Modern Switzerland," in *Inventories of Textiles – Textiles in Inventories: Studies on Late Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture*, ed. Thomas Ertl and Barbara Karl (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2017), 219–38.

**12** See Siebenhüner, "Imitation und Innovation."

Imitation is applicable in various ways to printed cottons, be it the desire to master a foreign craft, the adaption of a motif from the world of fine arts or literature, or the emulation of a design by a competing manufactory. Besides these practices of imitation through the technique of impression on cloth, the makers of chintzes could imitate easily other textiles like embroidery, silk weaving, or *chiné à la branche* (European ikat) with their prints.13 The masquerade of the actual textile is a side effect of this mimetic imitation of other fabrics across country, factory, and textile genre borders. In this context, design can be understood in its narrow reading as a "dessin," or drawing, rather than a product shape. This is because within the process of making, the patterns for chintzes would be drawn on paper first before being transferred to woodblock, copper printing plates, or cylinders, or sometimes painted directly onto the cotton. Printing on calico is very complex and involves direct dying as well as resist and mordant dying and bleaching.14 The manifold operations were mostly executed by specialists because they demanded an artisanal, chemical, and technical precision, involved secret knowledge, internationally traded raw materials as well as specific equipment and machines. Compared to knitting, stitching, or weaving, they could not be practiced in work at home.

From 1752 onward, European manufactories used copperplate transfers, and from 1783 roller printing, to accentuate the chintzes kinship with artistic media like engraving and printed matter in general. It not just shared technical procedures with the world of reproductive prints, but as a result also linked properties, like relatively cheap and quick production and thus large distribution. The applied designs predestined the media for a cultural appropriation through catering to the demands of the consumer. The strong emphasis on Asian savoir-faire-based craft could with the new technique of copperplate textile print embrace a genuine European art and aesthetic. Borrowing fine art motifs—be they mythological scenes or pictures after renowned artists —or illustrations from books and operettas became popular toward the end of the eighteenth century. An example is the furnishing fabric executed for the first time in 1795 by the Nantes-based Swiss manufacturers Petitpierre et Cie after *Paul et Virginie*, published by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in 1788 and translated into opera in 1791 (**fig. 2**).15 It is a tragic story of innocent young love that is set in Mauritius and included some slavery critical undertones.16 Through the application of the pattern repeated on the fabric, the copperplate prints would become an ornament and unfold

**13** See, for instance, Aziza Gril-Mariotte, *Les toiles de Jouy: Histoire d'un art décoratif, 1760–1821*  (Rennes: PUR, 2015), 99–102.

**14** See, for example, Fee, *Cloth that Changed the World*, 6–11.

**15** See *Indiennes: Un tissu révolutionne le monde!, Château de Prangins, Musée national suisse*, ed. Helen Bieri Thomson et al. (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2018), 145.

**16** The fabric was printed the first time just one year after France had officially banned slavery on French territory; it nevertheless took until 1848 for a complete abolition.