Textiles

Putting the blush in ladies'cheeks

What is chintz?

Since the late nineteenth century, ‘chintz’ has come to mean any floral printed furnishing fabric, made of cotton or linen, and often glazed. Its origins as a hand-drawn, mordant-and resist-dyed cotton fabric from India are often forgotten, but it is with these earlier chintzes that this book is concerned. The chintz textiles in this book can be defined as Indian cotton cloth on which a pattern has been produced by hand drawing with a bamboo ‘pen’ (kalam) and dyeing with mordant and resists. In some later examples, block printing may be combined with hand drawn ‘pen-work’ (kalamkari).

Chintz would usually have been burnished with wooden mallets to produce a shiny surface, but this finish has worn off in almost all historic examples. Chintz textiles were used in Europe, especially in Britain and the Netherlands, from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, when the availability of mechanized copies put an end to the trade in hand-painted cloths from India. Textiles had been decorated in India by the mordanting and resist-dyeing techniques for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, but these had been made for domestic markets, such as Golconda court, and for export to South-East Asia, with the Thai court in particular a major patron of finely drawn and dyed cottons.

The word ‘chintz’ appeared originally in seventeenth-century East India Company records and in English usage of the time as ‘chint' with the plural ‘chints’ It seems to be derived from the north Indian word chint, meaning to sprinkle or spray. While this may seem a curious way to describe the beautifully patterned textiles in the book, it is worth remembering that the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to encounter these textiles, called them pintado. meaning not ‘painted’ but ‘spotted’, and the term continued to be used for both printed and painted cottons by English East India Company officials in the early seventeenth century. Some chintzes do have a speckled background, on which either the dye or the mordant has obviously been sprayed or sprinkled - perhaps this speckled type gave its name to the broader category of mordant and resist dyed cloths.