Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

Veret · 1760/90

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

44.5 × 54.9 cm (17 1/2 × 21 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Mise-en-carte (Point-paper) is a working document elevated to art — a textile weaving draft rendered with such precision and delicacy that its grid of coloured squares reads as something closer to a painting than a blueprint. Produced in the latter half of the eighteenth century, this type of design was central to the French silk-weaving industry, particularly the workshops of Lyon, where skilled draughtsmen translated floral and geometric patterns into point-paper form for weavers to follow thread by thread. Veret worked within this tradition, using ink and gouache on hand-drawn graph paper — the grid itself laid out by hand before a single colour was applied — to produce a design document of quiet, methodical beauty. The result occupies an unusual space between craft and fine art, where functional intention and aesthetic refinement are inseparable. Point-paper designs from this period survive in relatively small numbers, making institutional holdings like the Art Institute of Chicago's collection genuinely rare primary records of how eighteenth-century silk patterns were conceived and communicated. The hand-painted oil reproduction brings warmth and depth to a work that was originally executed in flat, water-based media, honouring both the geometric rigour of the original and the subdued richness of its colour — a faithful tribute to one of textile history's most precise and overlooked art forms.