A Gujarat silk embroidery
India (Gujarat for export to Europe), circa 1730
83.4 cm long x 91.5 cm...

A Gujarat silk embroidery
India (Gujarat for export to Europe), circa 1730

83.4 cm long x 91.5 cm wide

Provenance: Charles Holme, founder of The Studio magazine.  Holme travelled extensively with his wife, collecting a range of decorative arts on route.  He was a friend of Arthur Liberty, who was also a fellow traveller.

Literature: John Irwin and Margaret Hall, Indian Embroideries, 1973.

A panel of fine cotton twill tamboured with polychrome silks in chain stitch with a floral meander of stylised fruits, flowers and leaves on delicate trailing vines.  The fresh singing colours in shades of red, pink, rose, blue, yellow and green and the exquisitely poised embroidery, combine to impart a superlative lightness to the decoration, the motifs seemingly to float elegantly against the luminous white ground.  The fruits and flowers are embroidered with variety and fantasy in equal measure and each element is composed with a sure sense of colour: curling leaves of yellow and green with a red stem, fantastic composite fruits and flowers with multi-coloured berries and petals.  A total of nine colours are used.

This textile is part of a group called “Trade Embroideries”, based on European chintz patterns and designed solely for export.  The most important group of these embroideries that can be traced back to a known chintz pattern are known as the “Ashburnham House” group, several panels of which are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these trade embroideries, also known as “Cambay embroideries” were, like chintz, all the rage in fashionable Europe where they were much coveted.  Cambay was the main centre of production, hence the term, but fine embroidery in the Cambay style was also carried out in other Gujarat centres like Patan and later Surat.