51st Annual Delaware Show

1 Mary Schoeser, “A Secret Trade: Plate-Printed Textiles and Dress Accessories, c. 1620 – 1820,” Dress 34 (2007). I am grateful to Mary Schoeser for identifying so many of Barlow’s birds in the Winterthur collection. 2 Susan Meller and Joost Elffers, Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period (New York: Abrams, 1991), 14. Excerpted from Linda Eaton, Printed Textiles: British and American Cottons and Linens, 1700–1850 (Published for Winterthur by The Monacelli Press, 2014). strike-offs on paper; the extensive, although incomplete, holdings of the Calico Printers’ Association in Manchester throw light on the period 1818 to 1837; and an enormous corpus of material is deposited at the National Archives in London, where thousands of cloth samples were registered for design copyright from 1842 to 1910. Another factor that complicates the accurate dating of textiles is the fact that designs have frequently been repeated, revived, and altered, sometimes over a period of decades. Designers have been known to incorporate different motifs from one publication or cut and paste from several, making the accurate identification of an original source a difficult prospect. Thankfully this is not always the case. The firm of Brunschwig & Fils has been licensing designs from Winterthur’s collection since 1971, a time when accurate reproductions of historic fabrics were highly fashionable. Their Bird & Thistle toile is based on a pattern dated stylistically to between 1785 and 1815. The pattern was produced originally with copper plates as well as engraved cylinders, and the plate- printed version has been in continuous production as a screen print since 1974. As in the past, today’s artisans continue to be inspired by what has come before. Designer and historian Susan Meller has described the phenomenon most eloquently: “The patterns of printed cloth suggest a larger pattern that contains them—what we may call the recycling wheel, which sets the motifs of textile designs on a circular road of eternal return. Nothing disappears, and nothing appears out of nowhere. Just as the individual pattern repeats incessantly over the course of a print run, its motifs are in repeat over the course of the decades.” 2 This article is sponsored by Archer & Buchanan Architecture, Ltd. — 149 —