Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

Royannet · 1760/90

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

44.8 × 56.2 cm (17 5/8 × 22 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Mise-en-carte (Point-paper) is a textile design document that transcends its functional origins — a grid of ink and gouache laid out with such precision and colour that it reads as a work of art in its own right. Produced in France between 1760 and 1790, this work belongs to a tradition of point-paper design — the method by which silk weavers translated decorative patterns into instructions for the loom. Each coloured square on the hand-drawn graph corresponds to a single thread intersection, meaning the designer was encoding a finished textile before a single thread was woven. Royannet's composition demonstrates the remarkable skill required to think simultaneously in two registers: the abstract grid and the finished silk it would produce. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a significant collection of these French textile designs, recognising them not merely as industrial artefacts but as documents of eighteenth-century decorative taste at its most refined. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intricate layering of colour and structure onto canvas, preserving the delicate interplay between the geometric grid and the organic pattern it carries — a fitting medium for a work that was always, at its heart, about the meeting of system and beauty.