Object Note
Set of a duo with (ZI2000.500762 EUROPE).
Object History
This printed Victorian silk (gauze) (shawl) dating back to the mid-19th century was originally one half of a set of a duo along with ZI2000.500762 EUROPE at the Dr Joan Coleman Collection. It was first purchased at a Phillips auction on November 8, 1979. Later The Zay Initiative managed to acquire it from Kerry Taylor Auctions in 2020.
Dr Joan Coleman began collecting shawls in 1976 and developed her lifelong passion for collecting. She was a regular at the London salesrooms of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips – three of the most outstanding auction houses of the period in the world – getting to know the dealers and learning in the process. She acquired vast knowledge and dedicated hours carefully cataloguing her ever-growing collection. She intended to loan her collection to different museums and institutions for the benefit of learning and education. Her collection is one of the largest and the finest private shawl collections to have ever graced the world with shawls ranging from Kashmir, Paisley, Edinburgh, Norwich, France, and Iran.
Object Features
This wine-red shawl is a Victorian printed silk gauze piece manufactured between 1850-1860 at Paisley, Scotland.
This shawl is rather unique because of a variety of reasons. The (screen_printed) designs are not just intricate but also use multiple colours. While it does follow the design patterns and distribution of the fashionable (long_shawl) from the first quarter of the 19th century, it is asymmetric in nature as one (warp) end of the shawl is framed by a thick border, the other end displays a large (phala).
The large phala is constructed of eight elongated (buta) or (paisley) in pink, green, and orange. The (jaal) between the paisleys consists of floral (palmette) giving way to stylized paisleys intertwined with one another. The body or field of the shawl consists of three different styles of paisleys in different sizes that are repeated multiple times. The (macrame) fringed tassels of (satin) (quadrilles) add a delicate finishing touch to the piece.
Although briefly, it may look like it had been (block_printed), especially the body, however, the execution of the intricate design elements leaves no doubt about its screen_printed production procedure.
As women’s fashion changed from long flowing skirts that paired well with shawls to (bustled) (crinolines) from the 1860s – the 70s and the subsequent rise of capes and jackets, the shawl industry in Europe, as well as the subcontinent, suffered a major setback. This change in fashion coupled with the Franco-Prussian War that disrupted trade between Europe and India made the original pieces from Kashmir far more expensive resulting in the loss of patronage of the aristocracy. With high fashion losing interest, even the demand for the machine – (jacquard) loom–woven fabric for the mass market suffered a loss. To keep themselves afloat, weavers thus started producing machine-woven printed fabrics at an affordable rate as a last-ditch effort to keep themselves significant.
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