Copy of the Goods of Montpellier (1809): Artwork and History

Copy of the Goods of Montpellier (1809) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as France.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This book illustrates the huge variety of intricate patterns printed in vivid colors on cotton textiles for fashion during the early 19th century. The book comes from Montpellier, a town on the southern coast of France that is not known today as a center of textile printing. Thus these samples indicate how much more widespread the textile industry was in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. This book contains more than 1,600 small samples.

Object facts

• Title: Copy of the Goods of Montpellier
• Date: 1809
• Artist attribution: France
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Cotton, plain weave; block printed and copperplate printed; total of swatches: 1650 swatches
• Dimensions: Average length of swatches: H.: 2.5 cm (1 in.); Average width of swatches: W.: 4.5 cm (1 3/4 in.); Measurement of volume: 48.9 × 20 × 5.7 cm (19 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 2 1/4 in.); 51.3 × 21.6 × 8.5 cm (20 1/8 × 8 5/8 × 3 1/4 in.)
• Type: Book
• Department: Textiles
• Reference number: 1957.500

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Chauncey B. Borland

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.