Many antique textiles have become too precious to use for their original purpose: dowry textiles such as Eastern suzanis and early English crewelwork, colourful Asian ikats, needlepoint for upholstery, embroidered silk clothing, tribal weavings. Today, designers and collectors preserve and mount these beautiful pieces for display as wall art. In their unique way, the textiles demonstrate skill, beauty and cultural traditions. Textiles can also provide a large volume of wall art at a far better price than a painting, which if you are working on a big project, is a useful budget-saving trick.
An antique ikat textile fragment enlivens a display of mid-century design at Dorian Caffot de Fawes
Domestic textiles also celebrate female artistry of past centuries: many of these pieces would have been created by women for their own or their family’s use. Their labour-intensive endeavour to create practical yet beautiful textiles can be admired and appreciated by us today.
Lengths of antique hand-embroidered Chinese silk textiles are framed to hang as wall coverings, perfect for a bedroom or drawing room. Silk should be hung well away from direct sunlight to avoid fading or fraying.
Formal tapestries and rugs were woven originally as art but also combined beauty with practicality (warmth). Needlework pictures, samplers and objects such as bead work baskets and animals, or three-dimensional stump work, popular in the 17th and early 18th centuries, used for mirror frames and caskets demonstrate the skills of women with leisured hours.
Detail of a French mid-C20th century tapestry offered by Quindry.
Commercial decorative textiles also make wonderful wall coverings, such as Asian embroidered silk panels that were created in response to a European demand for the exoticism of the orient from the 17th to early 20th centuries.
This antique block-printed textile, obviously originally for use as a window treatment, from Katharine Pole would also make a very unusual hanging to fill a wall behind a bed, or around a doorway.
Other traditional textiles and fragments that are popular to frame, or if large, mounted on stretchers for display, are block-printed cottons and linens, hand-painted cloths showing, for example, the famous tree of life pattern, cheerful Indian chintzes, tribal weavings like Fante flags, Kuba fibre mats and Ewe cloths, painted bark cloth from Papua New Guinea and the South Seas, and hand-painted Chinese and other Asian silk fragments. Antique garments or fragments can also be beautifully preserved when framed and hung as a work of art.
A rare Edo Period Japanese textile, fragments from a garment that would have been worn by a monk, shown here as a stunning wall hanging, at Justin Evershed Martin.
Tree of life textiles usually present as one large panel, and are perennially popular at The Decorative Fair. They are usually block-printed or hand-painted on cotton, and hail from Asia. Similar can often be found with Katharine Pole, Rhona Valentine or Su Mason.
A stunning 18th century silk dress has been carefully preserved and displayed here as a work of art.
