Textile, woven

Description

This woven silk picture was probably made in France during the late 19th or early 20th century. It was woven using a loom with a Jacquard attachment, a machine able to weave complex designs by following instructions fed into the device on a series of punch cards. The machine is named after its inventor, French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard, who patented it in 1804. Looms with Jacquard attachments could be nearly as tall as ceilings, and particularly elaborate designs required tens of thousands of punch cards to make. To create the designs, an artist would plot the picture to be woven onto grid paper – a sort of early version of pixel art – which was then translated onto punch cards by a card maker. Woven pictures, often recreations of paintings, were common in the 19th century both for their novelty and as a demonstration of the intricate detail Jacquard looms were able to produce. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.