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 designs by Marcel Tuquet

 

Marcel Tuquet was a prolific lace designer working at the end of the nineteenth century. His designs are generally floral and incorporate a more decorative band at the side which also runs along the bottom of the lace.

A notice I’ve seen from The London Gazette of 1890 records that he and Marcel Boudard were partners in a lace curtain design business in Nottingham. They not only designed lace but are also recorded as the owners of a patent for a double action jacquard (the mechanism by which pattern was applied to the lace machines). They were not the inventors of the jacquard system but had obviously patented a modification to the system that was already in general use. The purpose of the notice in the London Gazette was to dissolve their partnership. This seems to have been an amicable split, with Tuquet taking on the lace design part of the business and Boudard the manufacturing side.

The designs in the images here were all made later in Marcel Tuquet’s career when he supplied lace curtain designs to the Christian Stoll company of Plauen, which produced design inspiration folders for the European lace industry. Whether he had relocated to Plauen by then (approximately 1900) or remained in Nottingham but sent his designs abroad I have yet to find out.

Marcel Tuquet Nottingham lace curtain designer

 I’ve long admired the lace curtain designs of Marcel Tuquet and am lucky enough to have a folder of some of his Plauen designs published in 1900. I had always assumed that he was based in Germany or somewhere else in Europe but I have discovered a reference to him in Nottingham. The reference comes from the London Gazette in 1890 and is a notice that the partnership between Marcel Tuquet and Marcel Boudard, described as lace curtain designers, is being dissolved by mutual consent. It states that Marcel Tuquet will carry on their designing business in Nottingham and his partner will continue their lace manufacturing business. I’m now interested to know whether Marcel Tuquet moved to the continent by the time the design book was published or whether he remained in Nottingham and sent his designs from there to Plauen. If anyone can enlighten me please get in touch.