| Indian Chintz in Britain Chintz, and cotton textiles in general, had a dramatic impact on life in Britain when they first started to appear in London in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Before this, people had used linen and wool for both furnishings and clothing (or silk for the better-off), and cotton was immediately seen to be much lighter, more comfortable to wear and easier to wash. |
| Furthermore, the decoration of the Indian chintzes was of a type unknown in Britain. Most European fabric (other than those with woven designs) was patterned either with simple block prints or by embroidery, and the dyes used were rarely fast, nor were they very bright. |
| Chintzes appeared not only dazzlingly bright by contrast, but were also colour fast to such an extent that the colours seemed to get brighter with washing. |
| The designs themselves were soon being specifically made to English taste, with sample pieces and tracings being sent out to India for the local craftsmen to copy. |
| An exotic hybrid style was created that combined British, Indian and Chinese patterns and that fitted perfectly into the craze for Chinoiserie that swept Britain in the eighteenth century. |
| Chintzes were first used as bed curtains and wall-hangings, often replacing heavy crewel-work embroideries and woollen tapestries. These large chintz hangings that could be used either on the wall or on a bed were called palampores "" an anglicized version of the Hindi-Persian palangposh, which means 'bed-cover'. |
| The diarist and government official Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) bought some chintz panels in 1663 with which to line the walls of his wife's study. This is typical of the way chintzes (and other manifestations of the taste for Chinoiserie) were used at the time: 'minor' rooms of a house like bedrooms and studies would often be decorated with exotica like chintz, Indian embroidery and Chinese wallpaper, while formal reception rooms and state bedrooms continued to be furnished with lavish European silks and velvets. |
| Chintz bed curtains and wall-hangings continued to be popular throughout the eighteenth century, although sadly very few original examples of either survive in situ. |
| One notable example of an early chintz bed-hanging is the patchwork at Levens Hall in Cumbria: made up of small pieces of Chintz fabric, this has been dated circumstantially to 1708, and although there is no firm evidence for this, the style of the chintzes used does corroborate an early eighteenth-century date. |
| From about 1670 onwards, chintz started to become popular for fashionable women's (and to a lesser extent men's) dress, as well as for furnishing. At first confined to poorer women and their children wearing cut-down furnishing fabrics, chintz graduated to being used for linings and then for garments in their own right. |
| This transition from wall covering to clothing (and from lower- to upper-class usage) evidently shocked some observers, among them the writer Daniel Defoe who wrote in 1708: |
| Chintz and painted calicoes, which before were made use of for carpets, quilts etc., and to clothe children of ordinary people, become now the dress of our ladies, and such is the power of a mode, we saw our persons of quality dress'd in Indian carpets, which a few years before their chamber-maids would have thought too ordinary for them; the chints were advanced from lying on their floors to their backs, from the foot-cloth [i.e., floor-covering] to the petticoat... |
| These garments made from furnishing fabrics are often distinguished by their large-scale designs, unlike the later yardage with smaller floral patterns specifically made to be tailored into garments in Europe, or the purpose-made petticoat designs that incorporate a border and field pattern together in one length of cloth, ready to be sown and worn. |
| CHINTZ Indian textiles for the west |
| Author Rosemary Crill Publisher Mapin PAGES 146 Price £ 30 |
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