A GERMAN IN FRANCE

Evening Star, Issue 23129, 1 December 1938, Page 15

A GERMAN IN FRANCE

INVENTOR OF TOILE DE JODY There was celebrated in a French village the bicentenary of the birth of a remarkable German, Christoph Phillipp Oberkampf, who was born in. 1738, left his native Germany at the age of 21 (nobody seems to know why;,, and came to the hamlet of Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles, where there is a good stream for the bleaching of yam and the rinsing of dyedstuffs. Oberkampf was an economist whose interest was in the weaving and printing of cotton, writes Catherine Carswell, in an English paper. Now at that date cotton was fan from being a decorative or fashionable fabric. Linen was esteemed as a superior material in all households;! even so, printed linens were comparatively rare, besides being too expensive for general use. Those who could afford to have printed hangings or upholsteries or other patterned stuffs for decorative purposes bought silks and damasks or velvets. The poorer people had to content themselves with, specimens of their own' stitchery on. linen. . ■ _ Oberkampf changed all this. Ha had invented a process by which both designs of a formal sort and actual illustrations containing figures could be transferred from the original steel engraving on paper to lengths of cotton fabric —just then becoming cheap—or to a fabric which combined linen and cotton threads. In colours that are still beautiful after a century and half, he produced upon a white background varied repetitive scenes from, the classics and the popular readings of the day. Thus one could, for the first time, have curtains or bedcovers showing the Choice of Paris, a “ fetechampetre,” or scenes from the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, then affectionately known in France as ‘Le Petit Robinson.” Moreover, one could choose whether such scenes would bo executed in blue, in red, in mauve, in grey, or in green. HONOURED BY NAPOLEON. Napoleon, inspecting Oberkampf’a factory in 1806, was so enthusiastic that he took the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour from his own- breast and pinned it on that of the inventor. France, not Germany, hence cherishes the honour of having put_ cotton on the map as a decorative fabric, although the man responsible for it was undoubtedly German born. Hangings deriving from Oberkampf’a designs are still in the height of fashion, and they look right in the most modern rooms. -Less than half a century ago in France it was still possibl* to pick up genuine, often signed, pieces of Toile de Jony at almost any antique shop, and at such moderate prices that impecunious art students who appreciated the faded glories of their colour and design could afford to hang curtains or large wall squares made from the fabric in their studios at Montparnasse or Montmartre. Those days are gone, never to return. In museums one -can see grand and well-preserved specimens of Oberkampf’s work, but anybody who wishes to possess an example must be content with a few tattered scraps or be prepared ,t° P a .V » good price for a pictured square fit fop framing or glazing. . . . This useful man, to whom we owe so much, died in his seventy-eighth year, after what one must fancy was a life as happy as it was long .