2-734-327 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Long Shawl, 1785-1800. Artistic styles evolved with increasingly elaborate mosaic-like decoration during the 1800s to meet an insatiable European demand. These three shawls illustrate the changing fashions. Early shawls had plain fields with isolated plants in the end panels, which led to decorated side borders and vases of blossoming stems, as seen in the apricot shawl. In the vibrant yellow shawl, such flora was replaced by colourful, dense blossoms forming cone-shaped botehs, or paisleys, on trays. To this was added a gallery of small botehs and angular floral vines around a rich blue field with single botehs in the corners. A more elaborate gallery and larger botehs in the end panels decorate the later shawl on the right. Lightweight, supple, warm, and colourful, Kashmir shawls had no equal. Fine, soft goat-hair wool was woven in a 2/2 twill tapestry weave—the equivalent of painting with coloured weft threads. Imitations woven in Paisley, Scotland, prompted the popular term paisley.