Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

J Bt Clere · 1787

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

43.8 × 51.3 cm (17 1/4 × 32 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Mise-en-carte (Point-paper) is a working document elevated to art — a meticulous grid of colour and line that served as the blueprint for a woven textile design in late eighteenth-century France. A mise-en-carte was the essential translation tool of the silk industry: the designer would map a pattern square by square onto graph paper, each cell corresponding to a thread, so that a drawloom weaver could reproduce the image exactly in cloth. J Bt Clere worked in this tradition during a period when Lyon's silk trade was at its height and the demand for complex figured fabrics drove textile design to remarkable levels of precision and artistry. What distinguishes this piece is that Clere's hand — ink for structure, gouache for colour — transforms a purely functional document into something visually absorbing in its own right, the geometry of the grid alive with carefully gradated tones. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this work as part of its broader collection of European textile design drawings, recognising that these point-papers are as revealing of craft history as the finished fabrics they produced. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates that same quality of careful attention into a new medium, honouring the original's balance of discipline and colour without reducing it to mere decoration.