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.

Lace in fashions from 1873

 

These illustrations depict the latest fashions from an 1873 issue of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. This magazine was one of the most popular fashion magazines of the time. It had been founded by the entrepreneurial publisher Samuel Beeton in 1852 and was aimed at the middle class market (his wife Isabella’s famous book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was also hugely popular). By 1873, hooped crinoline underskirts were no longer fashionable and instead wide skirts were worn flat at the front and looped up at the sides and back to form a bustle, often with a pad of horsehair tied round the waist to pad out the fuller shape at the back. Swags, folds and pleats of fabric were swathed over the skirt and train. As you can see, the layers were trimmed with lace, ruched ribbons and embroidery. Some gowns were also trimmed with flounces of taffeta printed with lace-like designs, the edges of which were often scalloped or pinked to give the appearance of lace, although I think these illustrations depict machine-made lace frills.

This image, from the same issue of the journal, shows some fashionable accessories of the time. Hair was dressed high on the head and trimmed with small hats, ribbons, lace and artificial flowers. The small lace jacket also shows how lace fabric was cleverly cut to make use of its scalloped edging and accentuate the openings of the bodice and sleeves. Doctors were quick to condemn all these fashions as dangerous to health. Mainly because of the corseting required to achieve a tiny waist, but also because the bunched up skirts, high heels, and elaborate headwear tended to pitch the body forwards in a bent shape making walking difficult. Fashion has always been about appearance though not health or practicality!

 

Duchesse lace

In about 1850, Belgian lacemakers began making lace without an integral net ground; at the time it was called guipure lace. This type of lace was already being made elsewhere, for example in Honiton in England, and consisted of sprigs of bobbin lace joined together by fine lace bars. It’s greatest advantage was that numerous workers could be employed on the lace at the same time. Some made the sprigs, or motifs, and others assembled and joined them together, meaning that bigger items of lace could be made much more quickly compared with what one lacemaker working alone could achieve.

The finest type of Belgian lace in this style soon became known as ‘point Duchesse’ in honour of Marie-Henriette, the Duchess of Brabant. Marie-Henriette is an interesting woman, she had had a happy childhood in Austria, and was an excellent horse rider and musician. However, her marriage to Leopold the Duke of Brabant was very unhappy. They were incompatible and married against both their wishes when she was 16 and he was 18. They became king and queen of Belgium in 1865 and had three daughters and a son who died when he was 10. When Marie-Henriette died in 1901 they were living apart and Leopold came to her funeral with his mistress.

Those of you with keen eyes will have noticed that the lace in these images is not solely bobbin lace, like Honiton lace, but also incorporates some needle lace. According to Santina Levey’s book Lace: a history there were two main types of point Duchesse: Duchesse de Bruxelles and Duchesse de Bruges. The first type was made with fine bobbin lace flowers incorporating raised work, which is the raised outlining around the edge of the petals. It was also embellished with needle lace in the ‘point de gaze’ style, which is a very fine needle lace incorporating raised work, picots and small circular couronnes. Duchesse de Bruges was a coarser style and never included needle lace, therefore we can assume that this lace is the Duchesse de Bruxelles type. Levey also notes that Duchesse de Bruxelles lace was never a dominant fashion lace but was widely worn, mainly in small items such as cuffs and collars, like the one in the images.