The curtain falls

The last cloth is the finished cloth. The background color is almost black. The details in the pattern are light brown and red. Most noticeable in the motif is the yellowish color of the clean, undyed lines.

The color yellow is typical for batiks from the city of Solo. Batiks from Yogyakarta usually have proper white lines. The yellow color is obtained by a final treatment with a kind of oil. I cannot say with certainty that this batik was made in Solo, but it is surely based on the production process there.

With this cloth does not only the production process come to an end, but also the story of the LKM. The cloths were donated in 1936 by Louis André Driessen. The production process in the factory of the Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij had stopped in 1932. After several failed attempts to continue the company in a different way, it was eventually decided at the general shareholders meeting on the 28th of July 1936 that the company was to be liquidated. It is likely that some things had already been removed from the factory before the liquidation, among which these cloths, to give them a new purpose.