Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

Veret · 1760/90

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

55.3 × 43.8 cm (21 3/4 × 17 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

A mise-en-carte is a working document at the heart of the luxury silk trade — a meticulous grid-by-grid translation of a woven pattern onto point paper, used by drawloom and early Jacquard weavers to reproduce complex textile designs with precision. Veret worked within the celebrated Lyon silk industry of the late eighteenth century, a world where designer and weaver collaborated through exactly these kinds of annotated sheets, each coloured square standing in for a thread crossing in the finished cloth. The ink and gouache on hand-drawn graph paper carries a particular beauty: functional, restrained, yet alive with the geometry that would eventually become silk. These point-paper designs were essentially the software of pre-industrial textile production — a coded instruction set that could be handed from workshop to workshop across France and beyond. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this delicate, small-scale document into a format that lets you live with its quiet intricacy, preserving the fine grid lines, the soft gouache tones, and the precise repetition that made it both a practical tool and an unintentional work of art.