Curtain

Description

Mystic Print and Dye Works, located in Medford, Massachusetts, printed this column of red handkerchiefs around 1880. This textile fragment contains two full repeat prints and two partial prints, cut off on the top and bottom. The fabric would have been cut along the dotted lines into individual handkerchiefs to be sold. Text in a small box at the upper right corner of each repeat informs the reader that the handkerchief is a “Turkey Red” color. This vibrant shade of red, both popular and notoriously complicated to produce, had to be imported from Europe until domestic U.S. manufacturers first successfully produced the color in the 1860s. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.