A(very)littleHistoryofDamask

Damask takes its name from the Syrian capital of Damascus, a weaving and trading city on the old Silk Road along which cloth and much else besides travelled from the Far East to the Mediterranean by caravan. It arrived in Europe from China and the Byzantine and Islamic empires in the early Middle Ages. Damask was a silken cloth, a cloth the like of which no European had seen before, in a weave no one knew how to replicate. The patterns on a piece of damask cloth are formed by the interplay of warp and weft, a technique developed in China by the seventh century. Using just one fibre colour the pattern is created by combining two different weave techniques that set areas of plain matt weave against areas woven in glossy sateen. It is a reversible fabric, on one side you see matt pattern motifs framed by areas of shiny sateen - and on the other side the reverse.

The motifs woven into damask were Persian, Ottoman and Islamic and included pomegranate, pine cones, birds and acanthus leaves, patterns that can still be seen on damask fabrics today. Eventually of course, the Europeans learned the skills needed to weave damask, initially in France, but later in Venice, Florence and Genoa, travelling to London in the seventeenth century when France expelled the Protestant Huguenot weavers. Though silk was the usual fibre for weaving damask, the tradition in northern Europe was for weaving it in linen and wool.

From its earliest appearance in Europe, silk damask was expensive. Royalty and aristocracy dressed their formal rooms in crimson damask, deeming the effect of candlelight playing over the different matt and shiny textures in damask well worth paying for. Fortunately, as well as being expensive, damask was also durable, perhaps the most famous example being an Italian silk damask chosen for walling a chamber at Hampton Court Palace, near London, in 1689 that wasn’t replaced until nearly three hundred years later, in 1923!

In mid-eighteenth century Britain damask was the most use fabric for covering walls in high status rooms, woven either in silk or wool and stretched on battens. It was still expensive however, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her daughter in 1749 about the relative prices of damask flock wall paper and damask fabric, noting that rolls of flock “are as dear as damask, which put an end to my curiosity.”

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Asketchbookandabasicpaletteofwatercolourpaintswillallowyou toplayaroundwithcoloursandtextures-andeventuallytodevisea schemethatwillfillyourborderswithcolourandscentthroughoutthe summermonthsandbeyond.