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Description
Arlington Mills, a textile manufacturer based in Lawrence, Massachusetts, created this woven picture for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The image, a reproduction of Christian Ruben’s 1846 painting “Columbus Discovers the Shores of America,” dramatically depicts Christopher Columbus and his crew first sighting the Americas. It was woven on 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. To create the designs, an artist would plot the picture to be woven onto squares of grid paper, which was then translated onto punch cards by a card maker. The World’s Columbian Exposition, also called the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, was held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas. For U.S. manufacturers, the Fair meant that celebrating the achievements of American industry and promoting their own businesses were one and the same, and many produced elaborate Columbus-themed souvenirs, like this one, to sell at the Fair. Arlington Mills emphasized the technological sophistication required to weave this picture, writing in an 1898 publication that it “conveys a vivid impression of the possibilities of modern skill and machinery in the way of artistic weaving.” The company also recorded the specifics of its manufacture, such as the design requiring 21,024 punch cards to make, and that the steam-powered loom it was woven on had four Jacquard attachments and could weave two of the pictures in 75 minutes. While this example is wool, Arlington Mills also produced smaller, silk versions of this design: see object 2017.0019.012. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.