A large cotton palampore, India, Coromandel coast, 18th century

Simon Ray, London, 2006

Harvard Art Museums, 26 April-26 October 2008

Palampores, from the Hindi word palang-posh, meaning coverlet (often known as chintz in the West), were highly sought after trade goods from the 17^th to 19^th century. The Coromandel Coast was a major production region for export, with Gujarat and other regions also producing on a smaller scale. Palampores began being imported to Europe in the late 16^th and early 17^th century and became popular in Portugal and especially in France, Britain and the Netherlands, where they were used as bed covers, bed curtains and wall hangings, and later for garments. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary entry for Saturday 5 September 1663 that he purchased chintz for his wife: “….my wife and I to Cornhill [site of the Royal Exchange, the great City of London trading emporium], and after many tryalls bought my wife a chintz, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her new study, which is very pretty.” Palampores were also exported from India to other parts of Asia. The producers in India adapted the designs to suit the different export markets: those destined for Europe often featured variations on a large and flamboyant stylised flowering tree, with or without a surrounding border, although a variety of other designs were used. The basic iconography of the flowering tree such as that on the present example has been linked to the tree-of-life motif, but the style and decorative vocabulary used in the palampores drew on a wide variety of sources, including local south Asian textile traditions, Persian iconography, Dutch floral designs, English and European textiles, armorial iconography, and Chinese and occasionally Japanese designs to produce a blend of Oriental exotica particularly appealing to European tastes.

The process of making palampores employed the longstanding Indian tradition of mordant-dyeing and resist-dyeing and painting. Mordants are substances, typically oxides, that help some dyes to impregnate the cloth and fix the colour, whereas resist substances prevent other dyes from fixing to the fabric. Combining these processes allows the craftsmen to produce complex designs with a wide variety of colours and details.

The present example bears stamps in the upper and lower right corners of the reverse, a feature it shares with a number of other surviving examples in museums. These stamps related either to the makers of the palampores or to the company exporting them. Among the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, there are a number of examples bearing the stamps of the English East India Company (VEIC) or the Dutch East India Company (VOC), as well as manufacturers’ stamps in Tamil and Telegu and other stamps whose meaning and significance has been lost (e.g. Victoria and Albert Museum, 341-1898, 5475(IS), 5423(IS), IM.226-1921, IM-43.1925, IM-45.1925; Royal Ontario Museum, 927.40.5, 934.4.4, 934.4.12). The present example has the stamp of English East India Company (VEIC, United East India Company, the U of United being represented as a V) and a second smudged stamp that may be that of the Dutch East India Company (VOC, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie).

For extensive information on the manufacture and trade of palampores see the following publications: Irwin and Brett 1970; Irwin 1970; Crill 2008; Crill 2015, Fee 2019.