TSA Textile Tuesday: The Life of Joan of Arc

By Laura L. Camerlengo, Associate Curator of Costume and Textile Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Copperplate printing is the technique of printing onto cotton or linen with large engraved metal plates, measuring up to thirty-six inches or one-yard square. Textiles printed by this method often have designs with fine linear lines. Although some textile printers utilized engraved copperplates prior to the eighteenth century, copperplate printing did not become popular until the 1750s, after Irish printer Francis Nixon developed a thickening agent that expedited printing on cotton and linen with mordants (a fixative, often of metallic oxide, that helps bond certain dyes to textile fibers to make them fast). In Europe, the widespread interest in printed textiles corresponded to broader societal interest in print culture, including works on paper and ceramics, in the late eighteenth century. Common to this aesthetic was the printing of designs in monochrome shades of red, blue, brown, or purple, as seen in this textile.

This fragment from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco shows one of five scenes commemorating the life of the French martyr and Roman Catholic Saint Joan of Arc (1412–1431). Indeed, figural designs inspired by mythology, literature, and popular culture were prominent in European and American printed textiles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Joan reported hearing voices from God instructing her to save France from English control. From 1428 to 1429, she led the French army in several victories but was eventually captured and burned at the stake by the English at age nineteen. This scene shows Joan leading French king Charles VII into Rouen, then under English authority. Several French manufactories produced “La Vie de Jeanne d’Arc” designs based on a cartoon by painter and illustrator Charles Abraham Chasselat. The cartoon for the printed design, created by the Alsatian firm Hartmann et Fils, survives in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. A background of fine diagonal lines and scrolls distinguishes the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s fragment from other extant examples.

This fall, visitors to the de Young Museum, San Francisco, will have the opportunity to see this object and other European and American printed textile fragments in To Teach and Inspire: The Julia Brenner Textile Collection. Opening on October 23^rd, the concise exhibition honors the legacy of San Franciscan Julia Brenner (1866–1944), who donated more than one thousand textile fragments, as well as nearly two hundred costume components, costume accessories, complete textiles, and tools, to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), between 1923 and 1938. International in scope, with examples of weaves and techniques from around the world, her collection has served as the foundational holding of the Museums’ textile arts collection for nearly one hundred years. Brenner hoped that her collection—which she formed in collaboration with private donors, national industrial groups, global textiles manufacturers, and ambassadors and consulates—would serve as an inspirational and educational resource for future generations of museum visitors, particularly those working in the US textiles industry. By highlighting developments in technologies and dyestuffs while acknowledging recurring patterns and themes, To Teach and Inspire offers a visual and intellectual dialogue across two centuries of printed-textiles production.

For More Information About the Exhibition:

To find out more about the exhibition, please visit this link: To Teach and Inspire: The Julia Brenner Textile Collection.

The exhibition will be on display at the De Young Museum until October 30, 2022.