Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

L. Galy Gallien et Compe · 1764

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

42.9 × 53.1 cm (16 7/8 × 20 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

This delicate 1764 work sits at the crossroads of fine art and industrial craft — a mise-en-carte, or point-paper, is a grid-based diagram that translated a decorative design into precise weaving instructions for the drawloom, and this example is as beautiful as it is functional. L. Galy Gallien et Compagnie were Lyon-based textile designers working at the height of that city's dominance in European silk production. In 18th-century Lyon, the mise-en-carte was a highly skilled profession: designers would plot each colour passage across ruled graph paper in ink and gouache, creating documents that weavers followed thread by thread. The result was simultaneously a working blueprint and a miniature painting, with the grid itself becoming part of the visual language. Lyon's silk industry was so central to French commerce that Louis XIV's finance minister Colbert protected it through strict guild regulations — the very system that elevated designers like Galy Gallien into documented, credited craftspeople rather than anonymous artisans. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimate, grid-bound original into the richness of oil on canvas, honouring the precision and colour sensitivity that made the source document both a practical tool and an enduring work of decorative art.