Fabrique de Saint Ruf, Lyon, France - Design for a Woven or Embroidered Horizontal Border of the Fabrique de St. Ruf - 1805-1815 - T-Shirt

This is a horizontal border design from the Fabrique de Saint-Ruf, a Lyon silk house, showing clusters of daisy-like flowers above swags of lattice and laurel, edged with fringes of pale strands and blue-grey beads.

Visual Elements & Composition

The ground is an ochre-brown, and the motifs are worked in white with pale lilac highlights. Three groups of large flowers run across the upper half, each with a lattice-patterned centre and radiating petals, with smaller buds set among their stems. From each group hangs a swag of cross-hatched lattice banded with laurel-like leaves, and the swags sag between the clusters. Long fringes fall from the lower edge of each swag. The arrangement is symmetrical, with the swags repeating at regular intervals across the sheet.

Meaning & Symbolism

Swags of flowers and drapery were a familiar motif in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century ornament, suggesting festoons hung for a celebration. Here the drapery is rendered as lattice, which gives it a light, almost textile quality, while the flowers stand for the abundance the swags carry. Lyon led European silk weaving in this period, and the catalogue date of 1805 to 1815 places the sheet in the years when festoon borders like this were produced for woven and embroidered textiles. As a painted design, it shows how a repeating border was laid out before it was translated into woven form.

On This Tee

A horizontal border suits the front of a shirt. The line of swags crosses the chest and reads as one continuous band of ornament, with the fringes giving it movement as the wearer moves. Up close, the lattice centres and laurel leaves hold the eye, and from a distance the repeating swags read as a single festive line.