P3 has note
| - This is the only set of chintz bed hangings from this period that survives in a public collection. They would have been created for a fashionable middling or aristocratic household. The original use of the word ‘chintz’ was for Indian cotton cloth on which a pattern was produced by hand-drawing and dyeing with mordants and resists. While there was immense enthusiasm for chintz among British consumers in the late seventeenth century, there were also many opponents to the imported Indian goods, including the weavers of wool, linen and silk. In a bid to protect British manufacturing, a law was passed in 1701 to forbid the import of dyed or printed cottons and silk from India into Britain, except for re-export. Despite this ban, the overwhelming fashion for these light, colourful textiles led the writer Daniel Defoe to comment that it had ‘crept into our houses; our closets and bedchambers, curtains, cushions, chairs and at last beds themselves were nothing but calicoes and Indian stuffs, and in short almost everything that used to be made of wool and silk’.
According to a diary written by a the donor’s ancestor (Baptist Noel Turner, 1739–1826), these hangings belonged to Elizabeth and Christiana Willes, and were said to have been made for their house on the Bedford School Estate, London. The Bedford School Estate was around 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, London. Proceeds from the estate funded the Bedford School, and were also given as alms to the poor and to aid the marriage of poor women. Although difficult to prove, such narratives suggest how the histories handed down with each intricately pieced patchwork are often as cherished as the cottons and silks that document its textile history. (en)
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