Flowers for Mr Lekeux

On 23 October 1747, Anna Maria Garthwaite sold a silk design to Mr Lekeux. She put his name and the date above the flowers, then supplied a small key beneath them: dark yellow meant one kind of metal thread, light yellow another, grey a third. The watercolour carried instructions for making a surface that paint alone could not describe.

Peter Lekeux’s name belongs to the textile’s manufacture. Garthwaite’s belongs to its design. A long, sleeved waistcoat survives from their collaboration, with flowers and metallic leaves following the opening down the front and spreading around the pockets and hem. The design is in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum; the waistcoat is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together they preserve a particular transaction in the Spitalfields silk trade, and much of what the customer was buying from a designer.

The garment’s wearer remains unknown. Lekeux bought the proposal for a fabric, not a waistcoat for himself so far as this evidence tells us. The date records that sale; it does not supply the day the cloth was woven or the garment sewn. Between the sheet and the finished waistcoat lay the work of preparing the loom, weaving the silk and cutting and sewing it into clothing.

A business at home

Garthwaite had begun designing silks in the 1720s. By about 1730 she was living and working in Spitalfields, east of the City of London, where she settled with her widowed sister Mary Dannye. Their niece Mary Bacon was also part of the household. Garthwaite was a Lincolnshire clergyman’s daughter, with no known formal training in the weaving trade. How she acquired her technical command is still uncertain; the designs she sold give a much firmer account of what she could do.

Spitalfields offered customers within walking distance. French Protestant refugees, the Huguenots, had brought textile skills to London after persecution in France, strengthening an existing silk industry. Patterned silk needed specialised looms, costly materials and people who knew how to prepare and use both. Master weavers commissioned designs and organised production. A successful pattern drawer could supply several workshops without owning every loom that made her work.

Her corner house on Princes Street, now Princelet Street, combined family life and trade. Historian Zara Anishanslin draws attention to its two entrances: one led into the formal stair hall, while another admitted business callers to a room that could be shut off from the rest of the house. Domestic privacy and commercial access could coexist within the same small building.

Garthwaite also built a working collection of designs, including other people’s patterns, to consult and compare. Her own drawings were preserved in indexed volumes. Anishanslin has identified a second hand in their annotations and suggests that her sister or niece may have helped with this record keeping. The helper cannot be securely named, but the books contain more labour than the finished flower paintings alone reveal.

At her busiest, Garthwaite could produce as many as eighty commissioned designs in a year. Each had to offer something a weaver could sell, while remaining practicable in thread. The variety mattered: a new arrangement of flowers could make familiar forms of clothing fashionable again.

What the yellow meant

The key on Lekeux’s drawing distinguishes three ways of making metal appear in the fabric. “Dark yellow plate” meant a flat strip of metal. “Light yellow plain” called for a metal strip wound around a core of silk or linen. “Gray Frosted” specified a textured thread with a sparkling surface. Two yellow passages on the paper could therefore call for materially different threads at the loom.

Garthwaite was allocating effects as well as colours. A flat strip and a wrapped thread would occupy the woven surface differently; the frosted thread supplied another treatment of reflected light. The painter’s yellow and grey were a compact way to tell the workshop which material belonged where. They were not simply attempts to imitate the finished silk’s hue.

The placement of the ornament was equally deliberate. On the drawing, flowers and scrolling forms border a large open area, with a separate ornament above. On the waistcoat, decorated fabric follows the front edges, lower skirts, pocket flaps and cuffs. This was a shaped design, planned for parts of a garment, with ornament concentrated where those parts would require it.

That planning gave the expensive ornament a job before the scissors reached the cloth. The broad pale-blue areas and the dense flowers could meet where the garment required them. Garthwaite had to think beyond a pleasing rectangle on paper to the surfaces that would remain visible when someone wore the waistcoat.

Getting a flower onto the loom

To weave a flower, the workshop had to turn its contours and shading into crossings of thread. The warp threads ran along the length of the cloth, held under tension; the weft passed across them. Which warp threads rose, which stayed down and which wefts were inserted determined where a colour appeared. A curved petal had to become an arrangement the loom could reproduce.

The V&A describes Lekeux’s drawing as squared in pencil and numbered for the loom’s cords and pattern divisions. Those marks connected the pictorial design to the preparation of the pattern mechanism. They do not identify Garthwaite as the person who performed every stage of that preparation. The master weaver’s workshop still had to make the instructions work in its equipment and materials.

In the patterned-silk production described by the Met, two people operated the loom. The weaver inserted the wefts, while an assistant traditionally called a drawboy controlled the pattern mechanism. Raising the appropriate groups of warp threads allowed the next passage of weft to contribute its part of the design. The flower accumulated through successive operations; its outline could not simply be traced in one movement as it could with a pencil.

The organisation of this work helps explain why a designer’s material economy mattered. Raw silk was imported into London, sometimes from several producing regions within a single fabric. Preparing a loom also committed time before the workshop produced saleable cloth. A design had to make useful patterns within those constraints, including a repeat that could continue along a length without an awkward break.

Thomas Brant’s 1748 silk provides a different solution from the shaped waistcoat. A wandering branch carries scattered flowers across a pale ground, repeating along a cloth only 49.5 centimetres wide. It looks generous in its open spaces, but the branch has to keep finding its way across that narrow width and back into the next stretch of the pattern.

Brant’s workshop also changed the proposal. The Met’s comparison with Garthwaite’s surviving drawing identifies slight alterations to the colours and added texture in the background. The correspondence is close enough to establish the design, while the differences record a decision during its translation into cloth. The museum does not explain who within the workshop chose those changes or why. It does establish that the watercolour left room for a weaver’s contribution.

A dress across the Atlantic

Another of Garthwaite’s customers, the master weaver Simon Julins, bought a damask design in 1743. His workshop made the silk, which crossed the Atlantic and reached Philadelphia. There Anne Shippen Willing, the wife of a wealthy merchant, bought fabric of the pattern and had it made into a dress. Robert Feke painted her wearing it in 1746.

Anishanslin’s study connects the painted silk to Garthwaite’s surviving drawing through the pattern and its annotations. This is a different design from Lekeux’s waistcoat, and a portrait records its appearance on a wearer rather than preserving the cloth itself. Willing paid substantially for the silk; the seamstress who made it wearable received much less. Her name has not been recovered. Garthwaite and Julins knew one another, as did Willing and Feke, but the London makers did not know their Philadelphia customer.

Garthwaite’s professional life preceded a curious piece of advice from France. In 1765, Antoine-Nicolas Joubert de l’Hiberderie’s manual for silk designers argued that women should have a place in the work. As the V&A observes, he supplied no named female designer as an example. In London, Garthwaite had already spent decades selling technically demanding patterns to master weavers. The sheet for Mr Lekeux carries one of those sales in her own economical form: a name, a date and three kinds of metal thread.