Design for woven silk from the 'Leman Album', pencil, pen and ink and watercolour on laid paper, by James Leman, Spitalfields, possibly after 1757

Design from the 'Leman Album', in pencil, pen and ink on a small, narrow rectangular piece of wove paper. The design depicts a vertical, floral meander and is placed vertically in the bottom right corner of a page of the album next to design E.1861.49-1991 (VS.43).

Purchased with Art Fund support and the National Heritage Memorial Fund

This is a design from the so-called 'Leman album' which was bought from Vanners Silks Ltd. in 1991. Natalie Rothstein catalogued the designs before the album was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum. She gave each design a VS number (for Vanners Silks) in her catalogue Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century. The designs have been subsequently numbered by the Prints, Drawings and Paintings Department, however, a concordance exists.

Historical significance: The designs collected in the album are, with the exception of some fragmentary medieval examples in Italian collections, the earliest silk designs known to exist.

The design does not appear to be on laid paper. It looks like wove paper which would date it to 1757 or later when James Whatman's wove paper first appeared in John Baskerville's 'Virgil', published in 1757.

E.1861:50-1991