Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation. Bed: Toile, short for toile de Jouy after the Oberkampf factory in Jouy-en-Josas, France , is cotton, linen, or silk printed with monochromatic scenes, often dyed in red, blue, or black. While private today, bedrooms were semi-public spaces for centuries, and bed draperies were among the most expensive and prestigious household possessions. Politically commemorative toiles were au courant material for entertainment and stimulating discussion within the personal yet open setting of the nineteenth-century bedchamber or parlor.
Traite was printed to promote abolition, despite its inevitable use in households made wealthy by the trafficking it denounced. Image source: Art Resource, New York.
Click image to see full length of cloth in a new window. Further, it is a material fragment of a vast global cloth tradeβidentified by Giorgio Riello as the effect of a progressive shift in the textile-manufacturing core from Asia to Europe, spurred by industrialization in France and Britain. Traite , together with its sources, represents the interrelationship of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textile and slave trades with colonial racial identity and experience in Europe, Africa, and America.
While its use is yet undocumented in North America, surviving mulberry-on-white lengths have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, with a saffron-colored remnant at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum.
Injured Humanity, Being a Representation of what the unhappy Children of Africa endure from those who call themselves Christians, , Samuel Wood , broadside Click image to enlarge in new window.
