Piece with pheasants and exotic flowers

The textile printing works at Bromley Hall, Middlesex, England, was one of the larger early manufactories set up in the environs of greater London. Calico printers had been on the site since the 1740s, when the manufactory was operated by a Quaker family named Ollive that had reputedly been in the business since the late seventeenth century. This piece was probably produced when the business was run by the Talwin and Foster families, between about 1763 and 1783. The factory continued to operate until 1823 under the name Foster & Co.¹

A Bromley Hall pattern book of 144 copperplate designs printed on paper is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and contains patterns dating from about 1760 to 1800.² Though the design for the present fabric is not included in this book, there are a number of similar patterns incorporating birds and large flowers, and such finely drawn avian patterns appear to have been one of the factory’s specialties. The image of a meandering branch supporting long-tailed pheasants is an energetic mixture of European textile design and the exoticism of bold, fantastic flowers. The foliage recalls the multiflowering trees of Indian palampores, especially the giant curling leaf on the right side, which draws from the Chinese-inspired motifs that appear in the Indian chintzes. The long-tailed pheasants bear a resemblance to those in the Chinese garden scene attributed to John Munns (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, no. 1935-38-5a), who along with the Bromley Hall designer must have taken advantage of the many prints and pattern books available in the eighteenth century, such as The Ladies Amusement: Or, the Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (first edition, 1760) and A New Book of Birds (1765), both published by Robert Sayer in London.

English calico printers excelled at these large-scale monochrome designs produced by the copperplate printing technique developed in Drumconda, Ireland, in the early 1750s. Their advantage over Continental competitors during the first decade that the technique was in use lessened as the secret quickly spread. Nonetheless, the French, Swiss, and Dutch printers never attempted expansive patterns of this kind or scenic landscapes like those of John Munns or Robert Jones at Old Ford.

[Melinda Watt, adapted from Interwoven Globe, The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800/ edited by Amelia Peck; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: distributed by Yale University Press, 2013]

Footnotes

1. For a short history of Bromley Hall, see Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of English Chintz, p. 22.

2. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. E.458 ・ 1955).