Textiles: Trade and fashions.

Textiles were a vital part of the lives of people during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Just as today they were worn, scrubbed, crumpled, stitched on, walked on, and slept in. In spite of their utility, many textiles were also important status symbols. Few decorative arts so dearly defined who had wealth, who was important, and who was in fashion. Textiles were expensive, taking up a greater proportion of the average person's budget than they do today. A woman wearing a wide-skirted gown that required in excess of twenty yards of expensive silk was a walking advertisement of her own (or her husband's) considerable wealth (see Pls. I, II). A tall-post bedstead draped in fifty or sixty yards of fabric proclaimed the high social status of the person whose room it graced (see p. 185, Pl. XIV). Beds were often the most highly valued possessions in estate inventories, exceeded only by land, buildings, and in some instances, wrought silver and slaves. If the lavish textiles were also fashionable imports f rom distant lands, the effect was even greater.

Textiles played a dominant role in world trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were valuable, relatively light, extremely portable, and easy to pack up into bales for shipment around the world. The availability of textiles in England, America, and the rest of the world was limited more by tariffs, laws, wars, and navigation acts than by transportation and availability. Wealthy people were able to dress and furnish their homes with cottons and silk-needlework textiles from India; woven and painted silks from China; silks, woolens, and worsteds from Great Britain; and fine linens from the Continent.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has been collecting textiles and clothing since 1930. The focus of this collecting was, and is, on Anglo-American examples, especially those related to the eighteenth-century town of Williamsburg, Virginia. Nevertheless, very early in the museum's history curators and administrators recognized the importance of trade goods to round out the story. The Williamsburg textile collections contain a wealth of study documents, ranging from masterworks such as painted or embroidered bed counterpanes to utilitarian household linens.

Exotic Indian textiles became increasingly fashionable after the Dutch East India (Vereenigde Oost-Indisches) and English East India Companies began to import them into Europe beginning in 1597 and 1600, respectively Indians produced both embroidered and printed cottons. The former featured bold and colorful designs worked with silk threads on cotton grounds, often executed in minute chain stitches using a handheld hooked awl (pl. III). This technique is similar to European tambour work, which also used a hooked implement. Judging from the design, the brilliant counterpane in Plate III was made for the Dutch market; it is bordered with printed chintz from a later date.

Chintzes, or mordant-painted and dyed cottons, from India were washable and colorfast, and their popularity cut into the sales of British woolens and other textiles. It was not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that British producers developed competitive textile printing techniques using blocks rather than madder-mordant painting. The story of how Indian imports contributed to an East-West exchange of designs is well known. The exotic designs and large flowering trees influenced English textiles and at the same time, British merchants sent designs to be copied to India, modifying the colors and patterns to better suit Western taste. [1]

The counterpane of Indian chintz in Plates V and Va is one of twelve in the collections at Colonial Williamsburg. Usually called palampores, a word derived from the Persian and Hindi word for bedcover, such colorful cotton panels were highly prized for bed curtains as well as counterpanes. This example shows evidence of having once been used for curtains, which would have then been cut down and reassembled. Dating from around 1760, the textile carries the mark of the United East India Company (formally the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies), namely a stamp consisting of a compartmented rounded diamond with the acronym "VEIC" within.

Typical of fine Indian chintz, the cotton is not printed, but mordant-painted and resistdyed. In this technique, color fixatives called mordants were hand painted on the surface prior to dyeing with chay, which was derived from the root of an East Indian herb. Mordant painting produced a range of colors from lively reds, pinks, and purples to darker shades of brown, depending on the composition of the mordant. Blue and green colors were added in separate operations that involved wax resist and dipping in indigo dye baths. [2] Because the Indian products were hand painted, there were few limits on the scale or repeat the makers could achieve, and designs for Indian palampores often covered the entire surface of each large panel without a regular repeated design. Flowers, leaves, and birds were scattered in profusion over the surface. The so-called flowering tree that grows from a hilly mound of earth at the bottom of the panel is a motif that was used for hundreds of years. The mid-nineteenth-century chintz p alampore in Plate VI features a bamboo tree inhabited by exotic and domestic birds, all surrounded by a traditional undulating floral border.