Illustration: A.Yorston and Co. Printed textile design, 1849.
In 1849 the Glasgow based company A.Yorston and Co printed a textile design that was considered, at least in some quarters, to have been the best conceived design of the year. Although no prizes were given as such the Journal of Design and Manufactures considered it to be 'one of the most successful Scotch prints of the season.' This was praise indeed from a design magazine that had set itself up at the beginning of the same year with the intention of being a 'utility to all branches of commerce influenced by ornamental design.'
Although textile design in the mid-nineteenth century was seen as being one of the more problematic areas of British design, it was not necessarily uniform. Part of the remit of the Journal of Design and Manufactures as well as some other popular and more specialised publications, was to necessarily point out the lack of judgement and skill involved in questionable contemporary decoration, but also to celebrate those designs that were seen to work towards the standard being readily set by the design reformers of Britain. Such men as Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave, William Dyce, Daniel Maclise, Matthew Digby Wyatt, Ralph Nicolson Wornum, Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones and George Wallis, all members of the influential Cole Group, were charged with both castigating and applauding, hopefully in equal measure, the highs and lows of the British decorative arts world.
To be fair, not all was doom-laden and no more so than within the British textile design industry. There were a number of success stories and not all of them were attached to any form of specific influence from the Cole Group. The design of 1849 produced by A.Yorston and Co which is illustrated for this article was a printed textile using only three colours on a plain white background. It was machine manufactured and therefore its success was even more remarkable to critics of the mechanised textile industry.
Although the designer is unknown and may well have been a paid employee of the company, rather than a professional designer, still relatively rare at this date in time, the design itself works incredibly well considering some of the standard fair that was being printed by both English and Scottish manufacturing companies. The design is well balanced and its paired down use of colour allows the design to be both controlled and harmonised using the two dominant colours. Therefore, from a distance the pattern would be seen as roughly of equal measure between blue and white, dark and light, background and foreground, positive and negative.
One of the fundamental tools of a surface pattern designer is the play between two systems within the pattern. Very often this takes the form of positive and negative, and when successful the result can lead to some of the most memorable pattern work produced. When it fails, through inexperience, over confidence or temporary lack of judgement, it can fail miserable. Often there is very little between the two, apart from the right quantity and quality of balance and harmony, which is sometimes more subjective than objective, creativity not always being an easy partner with exact science.
That A.Yorston and Co succeeded with their own textile design of 1849, does go to show that the differences between hand and machine production, designer and manufacturer, critic and the profit motive were not always as acutely separated and contained as we would sometimes like to have believed them to be. Ideas and values overlapped and often could be seen in more than one conflicting argument. Good quality design could be produced through mass production and sub-standard design work could be produced by hand.
Why the continuing problem with the poor quality of British design was placed squarely within the camp of the British manufacturing industry, had more to do with the fact that by the mid-nineteenth century mass manufacturing dominated much of the decorative arts output of Britain, particularly within the realms of textiles. The Cole Group felt that mass production had given the industry a blinkered vision whereby quality was sacrificed for quantity, in other words profit over anything. A balance had to be found between the two, particularly as British export goods were suffering partly as a result of the lack of design consideration.
Publications such as the Journal of Design and Manufactures with their avowed task of pointing out the stark differences between the success and failure of decorative and design work, helped to at least form opinions as to what worked and what didn't within the industry. Getting the more intransigent areas of the industry to accept recommendations concerning design and the role of the designer within the industry as a whole, was a much harder task, as was the increasingly accepted use of education as a tool in which to gradually professionalise the role of the designer, all factors that potentially eat into profit margins.
Further reading links:
Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period
Pattern Design: Period Design Source Book
Twentieth-Century Pattern Design
Patterns: New Surface Design
5,000 Years of Textiles
The Pattern Sourcebook: A Century of Surface Design
Textiles for Early Victorian Clothing: 1850-1880
William Morris: Patterns & Designs (International Design Library)
Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century: From the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Surface Design for Fabric
Textiles: The Whole Story: Uses, Meanings, Significance
Paisley: A Visual Survey of Pattern and Color Variations (Schiffer Design Book)
British Textiles: 1700 to the Present
Textiles & Textile Production in Europe: From Prehistory to AD 400 (ANCIENT TEXTILES SERIES)
The Modernist Textile: Europe And America
Textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Textiles in America, 1650-1870
