Toiles for All Seasons: A Primer for Printed Textiles Book

Pick up an interior decorating magazine or walk through a home goods store and you will not miss seeing toiles in almost protean profusion. Toiles for All Seasons is about this fascinating textile story.

The technology to produce the washable printed fabrics we take for granted today, on anything from high fashion clothing to shower curtains, was not developed and industrialised until the middle of the eighteenth century. At that point, with an explosion of activity the business of printing colorfast dress and furnishings yardage transformed the economies of Great Britain and France over the next half-century. Printed cottons became a prime commodity and a major export.

This book focuses specifically on the early scenic, copperplate and engraved roller-printed furnishing fabrics, the rich complexity of their designs, and some of the fascinating stories their pictures reveal. The designs mirror every aspect of life and culture in the societies whose demand for these domestic textiles turned them into a fashion craze -- a trend that has recently been witnessing a lively revival in America and abroad.

Starr Siegele is Adjunct Curator of Prints, Allentown Art Museum. She was Research Curator for Printed Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago before becoming Fellow then Samuel H. Kress Foundation Research Scholar at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center and Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has served on the curatorial staffs for prints and drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.