Album of textile designs for woven silk, 'The Leman album', pencil, pen and ink, watercolour and bodycolour on laid paper, James Leman, Spitalfields, 1706-1716 and 1730s

Album of designs [104] for woven silk. 1706-1716, and 1730s. Bound with anonymous designs [2] of about 1840. Mounted on 47 pages of thick paper, half bound in morocco, probably in the mid 19th century, with a label of J. Vanner and Sons pasted on the front cover. There is an inscribed brown wrapping paper pocket pasted to the inside of the front cover.

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.

Attribution note: It is unknown, at present, exactly when the designs were pasted into an album. The current binding is nineteenth-century.

E.1861:1-1991