Zara Anishanslin - Portrait of a Woman in Silk : Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World

Portrait of a Woman in Silk

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Copyright 2016 by Yale University.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955526

ISBN 978-0-300-19705-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my stylish mother, Cheryl Stitt Simpson,

who taught me that fashion can be art

and

For her mother, Mary Catherine Roth Stitt,

who taught me to look back to the past

but to always keep looking up

Contents

Portrait of a Woman in Silk

Circa 1743

Paul Anishanslin

You hear them even now,

the young women, the young men,

those at the dark boundaries

of names not recalled, of no record found.

But beyond the lull and the silence,

there is a sound with a specific timbre and pitch,

and then another, and another, a

rising through the waves of your focus, your study,

of your concentration.

The unnamed begin to own back what had always remained.

It is a pondering of strange words,

and elaborate calligraphic skills;

of paintings once brilliant with

now curious shades of green,

of rare crimsons and deep violet blues.

There are the remnants of golden taffeta,

and silken black lustrings that

give us back each moment:

a specific right and a specific left hand

worked muscles in fingers and wrist

to finish a knot or secure another bolt

while a blooded heart

dreamed and desired under a summer blue blaze

as it eased into night mysteries

of jagged white lightning

and the echo and resonance of thunder.

It is the elegant whisper of history,

Elizabeth, Abigail, or Faith

George, or Christopher, or James,

as they help shape your words,

as they say to you and to us,

sing me my song,

sing me my song.

Prologue

It began with a silkworm. Undulating and munching on mulberry leaves, the tiny pale worm grew fat. It ate, defecated, and molted; molted, defecated, and ate, shedding its skin four times as it grew. Its growth complete, it began to spin. For three days it spun, wrapping itself round in a cocoon, a protective continuous fibrous strand made of its own spit. But this cocoon, meant to protect the pupa inside as it transformed into a moth, did not serve the purpose nature intended. The insect inside never emerged, fully transformed, to beat living wings, mate, and lay eggs of its own. Instead, it met the same fate millions of silkworms had suffered for thousands of years before. It was steamed or boiled alive, killed before it could break free. The human hands that killed it gently unraveled the shroud of its cocoon into a long, thin strand of thread; cleansed the sticky gum of its spit from that strand; and twisted it together with the unraveled cocoons of other dead silkworms. The worms cocoon had become a sturdy thread of silk. Made into the raw material for a lucrative commodity, it traveled, along with thousands and thousands of other dead silkworms cocoons made into thread, to be transformed again.

The cocoon turned thread traveled to London, the heart of the English silk industry. But from where is uncertain. It might have traveled from North America, shipped across the Atlantic on a private merchants ship. More likely, it lived its brief life closer by, in the Piedmont region of Italy. Or perhaps it lived much further awayin Chinaand traveled to England loaded onto an East India Company ship. Although the geographic origins of our single silkworm are uncertain, its chronology and fate are not.

This silkworm lived in the first half of the eighteenth century. The raw silk that then supplied Londons silk industry was imported. London silk was the product of silkworms that lived and died outside Englandin Italy, China, and, sometimes, Britains North American colonies. By the time a single silkworms unraveled cocoon was woven into cloth, its thread had often been mingled with raw silk from cocoons raised in one or more of these places. A London weaver, for example, might make silk using Italian threads for the warp and American threads for the weft. One piece of English silk mingled the physical remains of thousands upon thousands of dead silkworms cocoons. These cocoons could be from places as far-flung as Asia and America. With the thread of each silkworms cocoon, a history of global trade was woven into every piece of silk London weavers madelong before British traders exported that fabric around the empire and beyond.

The center of the eighteenth-century London silk industry was also where many of its weavers lived: the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields. Among the most famed master weavers working in Spitalfields when the silkworms cocoon arrived there were those of French Huguenot descent. In 1743, one of those weavers commissioned a design for a silk damask from a silk designer who also lived in Spitalfields. The designer the weaver approached was someone with whom he often worked, a prolific, successful patternmaker who was one of early modern Britains few women designers. That summer, she created an Asian-inspired pattern of stylized botanicals for the weaver. The damask pattern she drew flowered in sinuously bold curves across a grid of ruled paper. Her work satisfied the weaver, who bought the design and initiated the work of turning the pattern on paper into a woven fabric that mimicked the design.

Threaded onto a loom by the master weaver or one of his journeymen weavers or apprentices, the silkworms thread was wovenone careful inch and shuttle movement at a timewith those of other dead silkworms into a long length of shimmering silk. Weeks of intensive labor later, the silkworms cocoon became one of many threads that made up yards of silk damask. It was now a tiny piece of a woven textile that matched the designers much smaller paper pattern with remarkable precision. What had been dead insects tombs were now threads of gleaming, luxurious silk. The ugly, wiggling worm had become a thing of flowing beauty.

But the silkworms travels did not end here. Within three years, the silkworms cocoonnow a thread woven into yards of silkhad traveled again. Carefully packed to avoid damage, it was loaded onto a ship and crossed the Atlantic. It arrived in one of Britains most prosperous North American colonies: Pennsylvania. Once there, in the bustling port city of Philadelphia, a seamstress fashioned it into a gown for a colonial merchants wife. This wealthy colonial woman could have chosen almost any sort of fabric, for her merchant husband always had a wide array of textiles to trade. But she had a marked fondness for such flowered silks. In 1746, she left lasting proof of her affection for this particular flowered silk damask by choosing to wear it when she posed for her portrait. The painter, a sought-after artist from Newport, Rhode Island, transformed the dead silkworms cocoon again. Through his skilled craftsmanship, it became a small dab of paint brushed onto canvas. A strand of silk thread became one brushstroke the painter used to faithfully copy the pattern of the shimmering silk worn by the woman standing in front of him.