Description

Indian chintz and English crewel work share a language of colour shading. Colour shading is more readily achieved in the dyeing processes of Indian chintz; for the red and pink blooms that appear on many of the cloths, the painter could apply different mordants to the cloth, which would yield gradations of colour upon immersion in the dye bath. By contrast, English embroiderers were working with discrete stitches that made colour shifts more visible. Late seventeenth-century English embroiderers were concerned with achieving gradual shading of colours in their work and purchased their pre-dyed crewel threads in a nuanced range of hues. In this example, the embroiderers have begun to expand their palettes to red, blue, and yellow, which differed from the greener tones of seventeenth-century English embroidery. In this example, the needle worker has also replicated the chain stitch of imported embroideries that were brought from India’s western region of Gujarat. Indeed, embroiderers in England soon began to use chain stitch to the exclusion of almost all other stitches to trace out the fine outlines and inner veins of jagged leaves and slender branches. To capture the "shadow" at the edge of a flower, the embroiderers packed together single curving lines of different shades of red, ranging from pale peach and rose to maroon and wine colour. This juxtaposition of pink and red right next to each other was another unique visual trait of South Asian chintz textiles.