Mise-en-carte and Sample for Woven Textile with Cartouches with Flowers over a Seamless Pattern of Lozenges
Anonymous, French, 18th century French
Not on view
Mise-en-carte (weaving pattern) for a woven textile (a), from the late-18th century, with design motifs typical of the time of Louis XVI, when textiles were decorated with colorful garlands of flowers and leaves, as well as other naturalistic motifs and garden trophies. This design contains alternating rows of cartouches, outlined with orange and filled with orange stripes, that contain large stylized flowers with petals of different shades of purple and black and green stems with leaves, over a seamless pattern of lozenges rendered with yellow over a blue ground.
Placed below the mise-en-carte is a small fabric sample (b) with a fragment of what would have been the finished textile: the cartouches are created with gray, silver-y threads, the petals of the flowers inside them are created with threads of shades of pink and purple, and the leaves with green and brown, and the pattern of lozenges is created with light blue threads.
On the verso, the instructions for the manufacture of the textile are provided.
