Textile, woven

Description

This woven silk portrait was created for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition, which was held in London in 1851. This textile was probably woven in France. The image, based on an 1840 miniature portrait by English painter William Charles Ross, depicts the Exhibition’s host, Prince Albert. It was created 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. Many weavers submitted Jacquard woven pictures of the British royal family to the Crystal Palace Exhibition. While the subject matter may have been chosen to flatter the judges, the medium demonstrated the skill of the weavers and the technological sophistication of their looms. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.