Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

Germain Frères · 1787

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

45.1 × 55.3 cm (17 3/4 × 21 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

This 1787 mise-en-carte is both a functional weaving blueprint and a quietly beautiful object in its own right — a grid of ink and gouache squares that encodes the logic of a silk pattern into something resembling abstract art. Germain Frères were Lyon silk manufacturers working at the height of that city's dominance in European textile production. A mise-en-carte, or point-paper, translated a designer's pattern into a cell-by-cell chart that weavers could follow on the drawloom, with each square corresponding to a single thread intersection. Executing one required precision and a steady hand, and the gouache work here — layered in tight, deliberate marks across hand-ruled graph paper — shows the craft demanded of those who prepared them. Lyon's silk industry maintained dedicated ateliers where designers produced these charts as finished workshop documents, and surviving examples from the pre-Jacquard era are rare enough that institutional collections treat them as significant design history, not merely trade ephemera. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimate, grid-bound original into the depth and warmth of oil on canvas, preserving the geometry and colour relationships that made the design work while giving it the permanence the original graph paper was never meant to have.