Mise-en-carte (Point-paper)

Veret · 1760/90

Medium

Ink and gouache on hand drawn graph paper

Original size

45.5 × 55.6 cm (17 7/8 × 21 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Mise-en-carte (Point-paper) is one of those rare works that sits at the exact boundary between craft and art, its grid of meticulously plotted marks carrying both the precision of a technical document and the quiet beauty of careful hand work. Veret produced this design in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a period when French textile manufacture — particularly the silk-weaving industry centred on Lyon — had elevated pattern design to a sophisticated discipline of its own. A mise-en-carte was the essential working drawing from which a weaver would program a loom, each square on the graph paper corresponding to a thread intersection in the finished cloth. The use of gouache allowed the designer to block in colour clearly, so the weaver could read the repeat at a glance. What makes this example notable is that something purely functional has survived as an object worth preserving in its own right, held today in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The point-paper system Veret worked within was later a direct influence on Jacquard's punched-card loom mechanism, connecting eighteenth-century textile drawing to the earliest ideas in programmable machinery. Our hand-painted oil reproduction renders the delicate interplay of ink line and gouache wash with the same careful attention the original demanded, bringing this overlooked corner of design history into focus for any room.