Furnishing Fabric
ca. 1710 (made)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
When this length of yellow silk damask was given to the Museum in 1937, the donor said that it came from bed hangings in the London house of her ancestor Edward Haistwell, who was a merchant in the East India Company. The company imported large quantities of textiles from Asia into England, including silk damasks used for bed hangings, but the woven structure and the width of this damask suggest that it is European rather than Chinese. The similarity of its design to work by the Spitalfields master weaver and designer James Leman make an English manufacture possible.
Object details
| Categories | |
| Object type | |
| Materials and techniques | Silk damask |
| Brief description | Yellow silk damask, probably English, c.1710 |
| Physical description | yellow silk damask. 4&1 satin damask weave. |
| Dimensions |
|
| Credit line | Given by Miss Eleonora Armitage |
| Object history | The donor said that this damask came from a set of bed hangings owned by her ancestor Edward Haistwell, an East India Merchant. Family tradition connected them with a visit by Peter the Great. There is an unregistered valance in the collection made of pieced fragments of the same damask, which may have been given at the same time, although the papers relating to the acquisition do not indicate this. |
| Summary | When this length of yellow silk damask was given to the Museum in 1937, the donor said that it came from bed hangings in the London house of her ancestor Edward Haistwell, who was a merchant in the East India Company. The company imported large quantities of textiles from Asia into England, including silk damasks used for bed hangings, but the woven structure and the width of this damask suggest that it is European rather than Chinese. The similarity of its design to work by the Spitalfields master weaver and designer James Leman make an English manufacture possible. |
| Bibliographic reference | David M. Mitchell, 'My purple will be too sad for that melancholy room': Furnishings for Interiors in London and Paris, 1660-1735, in: Textile History, 40 (I), May 2009, pp. 3-29, p. 19 (Fig. 10)
Clare Browne, Silk Damask Bed Furnishings in the Early Eighteenth Century - Influences on Choice in Colour and Design, in: Furnishing Textiles. Studies on Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Interior Decoration, Riggisberger Berichte, 17 (2009), pp. 47-58, p. 51 (Fig. 25) |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | T.58-1937 |
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| Record created | February 2, 2007 |
| Record URL |
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