Textile, woven

Description

Arlington Mills, a textile manufacturer based in Lawrence, Massachusetts, wove this wool portrait of Christopher Columbus for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. 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 Columbus-themed souvenirs, like this one, to sell at the exposition. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017. Winterthur’s collection includes other examples of this design, woven from different fibers: see objects 2017.0019.001, .002, and .023.