Sunday 30 May 2010

TOILE BY THE SEA



L'Offrande de l'Amour ' Le Premier Navigateur
The lovely Toile de Nantes, (1805) on the right, is one of the many designs from the factory there which flourished during the years of T. de Jouy and other mills producing cloths of this genre. It is titled 'Le Premier Navigateur' and is from the collection of Elizabeth Gibbons, a well lnown dealer and collector of fine textiles.
The first example is original Toile de Jouy, 1792 - 1815 a very popular one and reprinted in different colours, purple, red and bistre, many times. The Offering to Love is full of romance and beauty. Many of these designs are reproduced in attractive books, but there are still many not listed and people like Morgaine le Fay http://www.antiquetextilesandmore.com/ , whose instructive, excellent blogs showing rare examples in wonderful detail, are worth studying. The other day I bought and sold quickly an attractive print on linen, showing a cherub riding on a dolphin, enough for a cushion, and was rather mortified to find, on a re-read of my reference book that it was a true Toile and it had skipped through my hands without a proper provenance - my loss and my customer's gain! Or did she think, like me, it was just a pretty old scrap ?

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