Advertising lace curtains

This image comes from a catalogue of lace curtains and Irish linen produced by William Whiteley’s London department store in 1907. Of course each curtain has to be described and the copywriter has come up with some exuberant descriptions for some of them. This one is just described as ‘Medallion border with trailing centre’ but others include ‘Very artistic reproduction of real lace’ and ‘A very dainty bijou curtain’. Clearly by the time he got to ‘Copy of real lace’ and ‘Imitation of real lace’ he was struggling to find something different to say! As well as the descriptions, an artist was also employed to draw the curtains, which must have been a skilled job as the images are very detailed and compare well with the sections of the catalogue that contains photographs.