Lace curtain designs by Marcel Tuquet

 

These lovely curtain designs were made by Marcel Tuquet, a lace curtain designer working at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a prolific designer and most of his designs include floral images, but whether this was his preference or he was responding to the fashions of the time I don’t know.

These images all come from a folio of his designs, which was published in about 1900 by Christian Stoll of Plauen. Rather than being catalogues for retailers or householders who were planning to purchase curtains these folios were aimed at designers in the European textile industry to inspire them and give an idea of current trends. Doodles and small drawings on the reverse of some pages suggest that they were used by designers for this purpose.

Lace curtains at this time were generally quite large and floral designs were very popular. In fact a large part of the training for designers included drawing flowers and plants either from real life or from other designs.

These designs were not meant to be copied exactly but mainly to provide inspiration and you can see how a designer might take an element from the border of one design for example and use it with the style of flowers in another, incorporating the trellis bars from a different design. The images shown here were all printed in the folio as they are shown here, with the border along the left hand side, but you can see how some of them could easily be rotated by ninety degrees and used as smaller curtains or even as the lower border of larger ones.

For most lace curtains we have no idea who the designer was or when they were produced so to have these folios of designs by a named designer is unusual and very special. It also shows us just a glimpse of the astonishing number of different designs an individual designer could produce and introduces us to the amazing skill of Marcel Tuquet.