Furnishing silk

By the mid-eighteenth century, French silks made in Tours, Nîmes, and above all Lyon dominated taste Europe-wide, increasingly surpassing Italian work. Such was the demand for colorful and naturalistically decorated furnishing silks like this example, as well as asymmetrically patterned dress silks, that it has been estimated that there were approximately 8,000 looms in Lyon by 1739. More than one third of the city’s inhabitants was involved in the silk industry as weavers and, more tangentially, spinners, dyers, merchants, and retailers.



This silk was displayed in European Textiles and Costume Figures, on view at the School of Industrial Arts in 1935, and at Walton High School in 1939.

[Elizabeth Cleland, 2020]