​
Golden Harvest was produced by Hull Traders, an innovative textile firm based in Colne in Lancashire, which specialised in artist-designed, screen-printed textiles. The Whitworth Gallery, which holds many of McNish's designs, says that Golden Harvest became their all-time best-selling design, and continued to be manufactured into the 1970s.

Sources:

Christine Checinska (2018) 'Christine Checinska in Conversation with Althea
McNish and John Weiss', TEXTILE, 16:2, 186-199
 
Whitworth Gallery, 'Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery', 2008-2009,
http://revealinghistories.org.uk/why-was-cotton-so-important-in-north-west-england/objects/fabric-golden-harvest.html
 
McNish and Weiss, http://www.mcnishandweiss.co.uk

On a recent visit to Copenhagen’s Museum of Design and Art, I came across this unrelentingly cheerful textile by Marie Gudme Leth (1895-1997). The textile is striking in itself, but I was amazed to learn what a significant impact Leth herself had on Danish design.

Leth transformed Danish textile production by introducing screen-printing through her Danish Calico Printing Works, a studio she set up in 1935. Before that she had travelled in Indonesia in her 20s and learned batik techniques, then experimented with block printing and set up a workshop producing block-printed textiles.

In 20th Century Pattern Design, Lesley Jackson writes that Denmark had no tradition of printed textiles until Leth established her screen-printing studio. Leth turned to screen-printing (which she learned in Germany) after finding block-printing to be too limiting in terms of production.

Her early work has many parallels with that of Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, two English textile designers who also set up their own studio in the 1920s. Barron and Larcher used labour-intensive hand-made production techniques for their block-printed textiles, including making their own natural vegetable dyes. Like Leth, Barron and Larcher used a limited colour palette and raw or unbleached linen for their block-printed textiles.

There the similarities seem to end, because Leth was interested in techniques that would allow for industrial production of printed textiles – hence her shift to screen-printing. Barron and Larcher continued with their hand methods until they closed their studio in 1939. (Interestingly, one of their apprentices in the 1920s had been Enid Marx, who went on to design for London Underground and the Utility Scheme, working closely with manufacturers on industrial production of her designs. I wrote about Marx in an earlier blog post – Walking the Block).

Here in England we still can't decide if spring has arrived. We go from being sleeveless and bare-legged one day, to sweatered and tighted the next. But one thing is clear - the buds are finally bursting. 

It's a great time of year to appreciate how plants grow. It's surprising what you see when you get up close and personal with plants. 

Taking a closer look at plants must have been a preoccupation of Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763), an English freelance textile designer in the early eighteenth century. She was a part of the silk-weaving industry that produced what is known as Spitalfields silk, fine fabrics for the fashionable of the time. 

Much of the silk weaving at the time was influenced by French Rococo designs, and much of the silk was produced by French Huguenot refugees, who settled in that part of east London. Garthwaite, who was unusual in being a notable female designer and an independent woman with a career, brought a distinctively English style to the silk. Her work - and she produced more than 80 new designs a year - reflected the growing interest in Britain in botanical illustration, and her patterns display more realistic images of plants and flowers than the stylised images in French woven silk. 

Here is one of Garthwaite's patterns, at the V&A Museum:

Introducing 'the principles of painting into the loom'

Spitalfields Life explains Garthwaite's unique talent:

'[She] contrived an enormous variety of sprigged patterns each with different permutations of naturalistically rendered flowers, both cultivated and wild species. Yet equally, her work demonstrates a full understanding of the technical process of silk weaving, conjuring designs that make elegant employment of the possibilities of the medium and the talents of skilled weavers. Many of her designs are labelled with the names of the weavers to whom they were sold and annotated with precise instructions, revealing the depth of her insight into the method as well as offering assistance to those whose job it was to realise her work. She was credited by Malachi Postlethwayt in The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce of 1751 as the one who “introduced the Principles of Painting into the loom.”

There's a Blue Plaque at the house in Princelet Street in Spitalfields where Garthwaite lived and worked with her sister (and which she bought with her own earnings when she was 40). You can read more about her house here.

You can read more about Garthwaite here, and see photos of examples of her work.

And you can see her watercolour patterns and fabrics at the V&A Museum, where a section in the British Galleries describes the work of the weavers and designers of Spitalfields silk.

“We told each other which colors we liked best together, and I remember the feeling of profound originality I experienced when I insisted, although it had just occurred to me, that I had always liked black and brown together best. I saw them floating in little patches of velvet, like the crazy quilt, or smooth little rectangles of enamel, like the paint-sample cards I was always begging for at the general store.”

Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats (Carcanet 1997)

Where do you stand on this issue of colour? I wondered about this as I went through the small but vibrant exhibit of work by knitting guru and textile designer Kaffe Fassett at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. I’m someone who believes black is the loveliest colour there is, and like Elizabeth Bishop I like black with brown – earthy colours. This show was way out of my league colourwise. 

Fassett considers colour to be 'a vital ingredient in life', and he was greatly influenced by a trip to India twenty years ago. Travel seems to be a key source of creative use of colour for him; a video showing in the museum's shop on my visit showed him ecstatic to discover a stall of hardware at a market in Vietnam, with screws and nails set out in small wooden boxes, making an impromptu patchwork quilt of bronzes, golds, silvers and greys.

Colour is vital and has great significance – historically, culturally, politically. Just think of the fuss made this week about what colour tie various newsreaders would wear when reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. We know that in different cultures colours mean different things. In Britain, for example, white only became associated with wedding dresses in the mid-nineteenth century, during Queen Victoria’s reign, after she was married in a white dress. Marrying in white meant you had money; otherwise you got married in whatever your best clothes were. In the US, red means Republican; in Britain it means Labour; in India it’s the colour of weddings. For anyone interested to learn about colours, have a look at Pantone: A Color History of the 20th Century; Brain Pickings has a lively review of this ‘fascinating and uncommon lens on familiar cultural history’ on its site at www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/11/23/pantone-book/.

‘Extravagant’ is one term used by the Fashion and Textile Museum to describe the range of colour and texture Kaffe Fassett uses in shawls, sweaters, cushions and quilts. That’s an ambiguous term, suggesting lushness but without purpose. For some, Fassett’s work lies on the decorative crafts end of the art spectrum, with all the twee connotations of knitting and interior design. For others, his pushing at the boundaries of traditional arts, including knitting but also quilting and embroidery, is inspirational - and all the more so for being a man in a traditionally woman's world. 

Whether you like his work or not, there’s something unnerving about so much bright colour in one place. It’s a sort of assault on the senses, but in my view that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes we need to be assaulted – shaken and stirred.

Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour is on at the Fashion and Textile Museum until 29 June 2013.

I bought the most amazing book the other day, from Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. It's called Walking the Block, and it's a wonderful book of poems by Ruth Weir, who was inspired by two women artists who ran a textile printing business in the 1930s – Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. They did hand block printing, making their own vegetable dyes and blocks. Weir’s poems don't narrate their life stories but instead pick up on events and inspiration in their lives. The book sets the poems amongst colour pictures of the textiles Barron and Larcher designed. It is a richly rewarding book to spend time with - to read, and to revisit. Its very existence is evidence that e-books will never make real books unnecessary.

But this isn't a rant about e-publishing. It also isn't a review of the book. But it does nick the book's title - which comes from what you do when block-printing fabric - you lay the fabric (or 'stuff') on a large table and walk the printing block along the length of fabric as you print. I love that image. And I love walking. And the title reminded me of the famous line of painter Paul Klee's - he supposedly said that drawing is just taking a line for a walk.

Walking is a great way to practise active seeing. Walking along my local streets recently, I noticed the shapes of the access covers (formerly known as manhole covers, but in desperate need of a more poetic and gender-neutral name). They are graphic gems, with beautiful geometric designs.

What they remind me of are the textile designs of Enid Marx. At one point in the 1920s she worked with Larcher and Barron, then started her own workshop. She was commissioned by the London Passenger Transport Board to design the fabric used for the seats on buses and tubes – called moquette, it is a durable velvety fabric that can withstand abuse. In its obituary of her in 1998, The Independent quoted her describing the strict brief she had to work to:

“The seating needed to look fresh at all times, even after bricklayers had sat on it, so there was a camouflage problem. The design, therefore, had to be bold but, because it was for a moving vehicle, should not be dazzling to passengers. In order to achieve the right effect strong contrasting tones had to be used, combined with changes of texture, from cut to uncut moquette. The scale of the repeat was governed by the economy of cutting up upholstery for seats of divergent sizes.”

Marx later became a member of the Board of Trade Utility furniture, and was in charge of textile design for this post-war initiative to produce inexpensive furniture to replace that lost in bombings. 

You can see Marx’s moquette designs at www.colourfulbeautifulthings.co.uk/colour-pattern-joy-2/

Chevron, Double Diamond and Shield are all designs that she produced that are still available. You can see these on the London Transport Museum website.

Compton Verney House in Warwickshire has an exhibit of Marx's work, on until 15 December 2013.